You Know, I Learned Something Today

Interview with South Korean director Kim Han-min

2011-11-01T23:04:00.013Z

Interview with Kim Han-min, Korean director of War of the Arrows

INTERVIEW DIRECTOR KIM HAN-MIN

Best known for the peculiarly offbeat murder-mystery Paradise Murdered (2007), South Korean filmmaker Kim Han-min has flipped all our perceptions this year and wowed the domestic box-office with the historical action drama War of the Arrows, a turbulent return-of-the-hero tale which takes as its subject the second Manchu invasion of Chosŏn Korea (1636-7). The film officially opens the London Korean Film Festival this coming Thursday (3 November), and I interviewed the director here in London before the UK press screening in September. The full interview is up at New Korean Cinema, where there’s plenty of information on the festival this year, but here’s a morsel . . .

“It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film:” a conversation on Kim Han-min and his film, War of the Arrows

With War of the Arrows imagery everywhere and PR staff politely hustling, Kim has the confidence and edge of a man who has turned a full-bore, 100-day long, multi-million dollar production into possibly the year’s single biggest attraction at the Korean multiplex

. . . We’re holding the interview in the library corner of the Korean Cultural Centre at a time when the film’s total ticket sales are 450,000 shy of Sunny (Sseoni, 2011), the friendships-and-terminal-illness tale from writer-director Kang Hyung-chul which appears to have mushroomed beyond anything we might have expected and currently holds the top spot for biggest domestic draw of the year. Within the month, War of the Arrows will pass the 7.4 million admissions mark, moving it safely out of the commercial blockbusters zone but still short of the sort of numbers racked up by the disaster phenomenon Haeundae (aka., Tidal Wave, 2009) and the 2008 sleeper comedy Scandal Makers (aka., Speed Scandal, Gwasokseukaendeul). But the train doesn’t stop there. At this point, Kim and his sales team are skilfully carving out an international platform for the film that will take it from London to the States, where it’s set to play in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas; to Canada where it’s confirmed in Toronto and Vancouver; and then back here for the festival stint where it opens the London Korean Film Festival in November.

Which is nice for Kim, and good for K.O.F.I.C., the state-supported organisation responsible for promoting Korean films abroad and supplying the majority of us in the west with clean, reliable information . . . But all of this has an effect on the realities of interviewing. With War of the Arrows imagery everywhere and PR staff politely hustling, Kim has the confidence and edge of a man who has turned a full-bore, 100-day long, multi-million dollar production into possibly the year’s single biggest attraction at the Korean multiplex. “The amount of pressure was immense,” admits the director. “I started filming in February this year and had to finish on June 9 for an August 10 release date.” While principal photography is usually shorter for Korean films—obviously this part of the production process is very much influenced by the unique aesthetic and technical demands, as well as economic factors, of the historical film; by contrast, typical productions can be turned around in well under twelve weeks—there is no question at all that War of the Arrows’ post-production period was alarmingly short, even with the benefits of Korea’s growing post-production activities and services. “It was an incredibly short period of time, it required very clear and succinct communication with a lot of different people. I received help from specialist members of staff and liaised with the special effects departments very closely. The pressure was huge, but I was very lucky to have met such good crew members this year—sometimes they came up with better ideas than me so this made things easier!”

A Korea Times piece on War of the Arrows, published in August (‘Arrows aims for new horizons’), gives the impression that the film’s production budget was low; this is true of historical films produced in the globalised Hollywood system but not in the current Korean industry where lavish budgets on the scale of I Saw the Devil (Angmareul Boatda, 2010) are exceptionally rare. In 2010, the average production budget, excluding prints and advertising, was KW 1.42 billion (US$1.2 million); by contrast, Kim’s film, earmarked from the start as a big-budget historical production, cost KW 9 billion (US$8.5 million). I quote this information to Kim, primarily because it is worth getting confirmation on production budgets at every unusual opportunity but also because I want to test The Korea Times’ contention that a US$8-9 million budget should be restrictive at all in the current Korean film industry. Kim laughs. “There was nothing I couldn’t do with that money. If it was a bit more I could maybe have looked after the staff a bit better . . .”

Generally Kim seems to prefer writing and directing his own projects. Though he has worked with other screenwriters—on his short-film debut Sympathy (Yeonmin, 1998) and then again on his second feature, the occasionally daffy blackmail thriller Handphone (Haendeupon, 2009), written by Kim Mi-hyun—his self-authored output has performed more respectably at the box office and garnered local festival awards. To date he has written and directed the short films Sunflower Blues (1999) and Three Hungry Brothers (Galchiguidam, 2003), his feature debut Paradise Murdered, aka. Paradise 1986 (Geukrakdo Salinsageon, 2007), which made the top best selling films list in the year of its release, and of course War of the Arrows. “My first priority and main job is directing. It is a bit unfortunate that I can’t find a like-minded writer, I just end up doing the job myself . . . Strangely, the films where I’ve had another writer onboard, like Handphone, were not the ones that were commercially successful. I’ve been mulling that point over recently, to see what that’s about.”

Full interview published at New Korean Cinema.

1 November, 2011

Eyes watching horror and calculated assaults in The Reef

2011-09-29T16:03:00.007+01:00

Seen from this perspective: eyes watching horror and calculated assaults in The Reef

FILM THE REEF DIRECTOR ANDREW TRAUCKI

Filmed almost entirely offshore and in ubiquitous light, Daniel Ardilley’s camera moves from the pastel-blues and off-white glare of the surface to the clear waters of the reef, and the ominous voids that appear beyond its magnificent sections of coral. So effective is the approach that the whole endeavour feels like an underwater movie ...

In horror cinema, the appetite for explicit, punishing and phantasmagoric deaths is insatiable. At the Frightfest screening of Final Destination 5 (Steven Quale, 2011, USA) this year, the artless nature of gymnast Candice Hooper’s (Ellen Wroe) death was so breathtaking, so lingeringly unashamedly brazen, that we very nearly gave this one sequence a standing ovation in the aisles (it received enthusiastic applause instead). By the time Miles Fisher’s Peter decides much later on in the film to intervene in the Final Destination schema (he fixes, in the third and dullest act, to kill off a survivor in order to save himself), not one Frightfest attendee in Cinema 1 that night wasn’t wishing for a return to the Fischli & Weissian chain-reaction of death that made Candice’s earlier comeuppance so memorable. Her death scene is up on YouTube with a three hundred thousand view count and rising. This fetishistic adulation of the “death spectacle” (very much the USP of the Destination series) is largely absent from The Reef (2010, Australia), Andrew Traucki’s low-budget horror film about a group of stranded vacationers who are stalked by a Great White as they navigate the Coral Sea Islands. This absence provides the space for a more interesting cinematic world. The gags may be staler (this is the most humourless Australian thriller I think I’ve seen in years), but Traucki makes particularly effective use of the first-person camera, exploring the potentialities of objective and subjective camera work in underwater photography. Our sense of fear, curiosity and alarm derives in great part from this point-of-view structure: like all slasher films, The Reef teases us, it makes us look, and then it hurts us. So in addition to our common hunger for the death spectacle, there is then the simple fact that we pay good money to experience an assault of sorts on ourselves; the pleasure of surviving unscathed, though deeply shaken, simultaneously liberates and excites us.

In some respects The Reef is a film about our compulsion to look at and register horror. Carol Clover (1992), who’s written extensively on horror cinema and particularly on our spectatorial need to see horror films at all, uses the phrase “eyes watching horror.” Her phrasing can and does encompass many eyes of horror: the victim’s eye looking in at horror, an innocent who sees telepathically the harm done to others, the eye of the killer itself, the “memory eye” which visualises people or events otherwise lost in the past, and not least the spectatorial eye which is assaulted by horror over and over (from Hitchcock and Powell to Hooper and Craven, through even to Gens and Laugier). Those familiar with both the fatalistic desire of protagonist Heather Donahue to capture the eponymous entity of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999, USA) on film and with the cartoonish assault which floors her in the final reel will recognise in The Reef familiar strategies at play, though clearly reformulated to achieve different ends. In The Blair Witch, for instance, the many “incidents” captured by the documentary filmmakers on handheld cameras in the dead of night are memorable for being disorienting but also for containing absolutely nothing—as Mallin (2001) states: the film “makes the fact of not seeing the proof of a malevolent otherworldly presence.” Mallin adds that “the story is about the need to complete the story.” As consumers of narrative, we search for information and certitude—our personal “project” as an audience therefore is to become active participants and to “see” in the footage of The Blair Witch Project that which the documentary filmmakers ultimately failed to see and fully grasp for themselves. In The Reef, more than simply involving us in the scene, first-person cinematography is used repeatedly to train our spectatorial eye to similarly drop its guard—to borrow terminology used by Cumbow (1990), it imposes a way of seeing, a vision, on the audience, a vision that is not necessarily adversarial but which plays to and plays on our compulsion to look. Inevitably, as the film moves on, we begin to search for the thing that now hunts us .

While demonstrating there certainly is nothing new under the sun, Traucki’s film pulls off some of the genre’s most reliable scenarios in fascinating ways. Two things occur from the outset. Firstly, The Reef owes much to its unique geographic location. Set in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, the film traces the plight of four victims—Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling) and Kate (Zoe Naylor), and Matt (Gyton Grantley) and Suzie (Adrienne Pickering)—as they use small sections of the Great Barrier Reef to escape the dangers of the open ocean. Filmed almost entirely offshore and in ubiquitous light, Daniel Ardilley’s camera moves effortlessly from the pastel-blues and off-white glare of the surface to the clear warm waters of the reef and the ominous voids that appear beyond its magnificent sections of coral. So effective is the approach that the whole endeavour feels like an underwater movie. It becomes quite clear early on that The Reef offers audiences of popular thrillers, especially those in the west, respite from the animated environments that plague the screen victims of Open Water (Chris Kentis, 2003, USA) and Adrift (Hans Horn, 2006, Germany). The ocean is idyllic, the characters are bathed in sunlight, the currents aid their survival plan, and errant objects that appear on the surface are visible at much greater distances. In this environment, not only can we see telltale signs of danger adequately from far away, we also see adequately enough below the surface (rarely have the two approaches been coupled competently in Hollywood film). This produces an uncanny affect. One could argue (and not entirely without some recourse to alcohol) that the film channels and exorcises Joseph Sargent’s Jaws the Revenge (1987, USA)—that rotten, instantly tedious, and breathtakingly inept third sequel in the Universal franchise—for the fact that Traucki’s staging of the drama recalls the Ellen Brody character’s nightmarish vision of herself swimming alone in crystal waters, a vision which betrays a fatalistic longing to return to the ocean despite her overt fears. When we dream we seem not so much to be in control of our bodies as watching our bodies forcefully rebel; common-sense takes a walk, and reality dawns on us cuttingly fast. This dream-logic marries well with The Reef’s fantastic environments: human rationality, emotional reasoning and decision-making at the non-conscious level all figure large in the film. A sequence in which Matt breaks away from the tightly-grouped party of survivors in order to retrieve a stray kickboard is the film’s most flatfooted example of bodily rebellion: the scene works cheerfully as suspense, but we instantly write off Matt’s chances because his actions are foolhardy, no one in their right mind would ever attempt the same thing. Yet Matt’s compulsion to swim for the kickboard overtakes him, primordial feelings—I have a body, it must be protected—kick in. Another immersive set-piece—in which Luke and Kate, still far from making landfall, make it to several coral clusters which penetrate the surface of the water—plays well too, but once again seems more in keeping with our expectations concerning fantasy and dream-logic. The conceit is so effective allegorically, and in addition it plays so well on primordial feelings (during, and especially in the hours after the film), that the entire sequence delivers an authentic experience for us as viewers—in Todd McGowan’s (2007) words (used about a different film but helpful here too) it keeps us in the attitude of questioning. With its survival theme and fantasmatic set-pieces set in colourful environments, The Reef feels like a wish-fulfilment narrative dreamt up by an anxious, and fevered, and desiring Luke.

The second point to make concerns the first-person camera. Thankfully we’re spared in this scenario anything quite so roundly stupid as a Jawsian camera—mounted behind the dorsal fin in Jeannot Szwarc’s not-terrible sequel Jaws 2 (1978, USA); sharing the nodding, bobbing shark’s-eye-view in Jaws: The Revenge; or matter-of-factly conjuring shark-vision through a goldfish bowl in Renny Harlin’s godawful Deep Blue Sea (1999, USA). However, Traucki uses unusually long takes of the stalking shark, pieced together from footage shot with underwater cameras from the safety of a cage and a boat respectively, in order to create the illusion of the first-person subjective camera. This footage, remastered, edited, and digitally cleaned, becomes everything that Luke sees underwater through his goggles, or at the very least it privileges an omniscient film-world camera that captures the same things Luke sees. The film makes good use of this device to generate tension—it is Luke who monitors the shark as it circles the defenceless group and only Luke; the others remain none the wiser. But more than a gimmick, the first-person camera is used over and over again. This makes clear two things: that the filmmakers are aiming for a verisimilitude which is difficult to attain (particularly for low-budget productions) without recourse to authentic underwater footage of real sharks; and secondly, that the first-person camera becomes effectively the reactive gaze of slasher horror cinema—it performs the same job as Pablo’s (Pablo Rosso) infrared camera in the memorable closing moments of [Rec.] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007, Spain), as Heather and Josh’s cameras in The Blair Witch Project.

What excites me about this approach is that the film affords us, albeit in edited form, several opportunities for observing characteristically small changes in the Great White’s minimalist threat display. The sharks (we use here the plural because the film-shark is of course represented by many different whites) move slowly from non-aggressive posturing into a subtly more pronounced display advertising at first bulk and body length, and then jaw size and gape. Of course, Traucki’s footage of the shark circling its prey still provides a distortion—a white which has been drawn to a fish carcass by human agency via chumming moves in on its prey very differently to an unmonitored white that is provoked by something far larger, less familiar, and potentially more dangerous than itself, like a swimmer—therefore, we are still watching an imaginary. The available footage is configured and manipulated for fantasy cinema, thus the shark’s behaviour is still misrepresented. But considering we’re in an age where Hollywood productions (and news organisations) can barely do a thing with whites, Makos and even sand tigers beyond recapitulating the same tired representational strategies employed by Steven Spielberg thirty-six years ago, this sense of a half-turn towards real-world experience and real-world behaviour does at least offer us, as engaged audiences, possibilities for making sense of the cinematic white shark in less mercurial ways.

Thus bringing us to the importance of looking. In The Reef, looking is about as helpful as screaming and kicking. Luke frequently lowers his head into the water in order to see if the threat is still real and to see from where the next attack is coming. But he gleans no useful information by doing this (he can’t help the others because the shark is unpredictable, fast and, in its circling patterns, mildly hypnotic); all he can do is look. Why, then, does Traucki make him look so often? We, on the other hand, scrutinise the frame and anticipate the assault because we need to see, it is part and parcel of our masochistic (to cite Clover again) investment in pain. We do so not out of curiosity, but of necessity. The most interesting aspect of The Reef for me concerned the nature of this desire to look. On the one hand, the subjective camera is very clearly a device which can be manipulated by filmmakers (in this case Traucki) to create a desired effect: to heighten suspense, to collapse the visible distance between the shark and its prey, or to launch a visual attack on an audience. Being on the receiving end, we either overlook this system of production in order to preserve the illusion of an autonomous world, or we suppress our direct involvement altogether and remain detached. On the other hand, the very cinematic image generated by the subjective camera takes on and brings into being a variety of meanings/ideas which move cinema beyond the technical aspects of its construction. On this website, we’re mainly concerned with the latter. This idea that cinematic images in some way convey or hold consciousness, or thought, inspires many of the responses on these pages. In the end, The Reef is possibly no different from a film like Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960, UK), which brings the protagonist Mark’s victims face to face with their own deaths, but which critically trades on Mark’s own masochistic identification with their suffering. Traucki’s film turns on a similar pleasure: the very human compulsion to see with our own eyes the horror which is about to befall us.

29 September, 2011

2011-04-13T01:34:00.022+01:00

It’s hard enough walking around in Southbank Centre when you are shoulder to shoulder with people frothing at the mouth because it is warm out, but add wine into the mix and suddenly you are transported into the throng of a matchplay tournament, surrounded by drink-ravaged caricatures chanting “Who's afraid of Leonard Rossiter?” ... Or, 2001: A Space Odyssey Live

EVENT 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY LIVE VENUE ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL

And then it began: the leisurely Nature theme, the metronomic pounding of the kettledrums, then full-on orchestration, the instrumental symphonic force of the piece cutting right into us, arriving finally at that incredible C major chord sustained as the orchestra came to rest. Oh yes, this was close to an unmitigated triumph ...

Settling into the stalls of the Southbank Centre’s near-three thousand-seater Royal Festival Hall, slender blondes in their summer dresses, red-faced men with wild hair on their heads and single youngish musicians watched the Philharmonia Orchestra’s special presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey Live. Originally, cinemas of the time c-1968 played the overture from György Ligeti’s Atmospheres while the screen remained dormant behind curtains and audiences found their places in the auditorium—but we were already seated, the conductor André de Ridder also already introduced, and everyone in attendance was busily awaiting the triumphant, space-filling fanfare of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra and the sight of that piercing sun rise above Earth and Moon. The overture at an end we allowed ourselves a moment of relaxation to tune out the environment, and then it began: the leisurely Nature theme, played three times with horns, the metronomic pounding of the kettledrums, then full-on orchestration, the instrumental symphonic force of the piece cutting right into us (as Kubrick once said, “short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness”), arriving finally at that incredible C major chord sustained as the orchestra came to rest. Oh yes, this was close to an unmitigated triumph.

Broadly speaking, the films shortlisted for events of this kind—in which an orchestra provides live accompaniment to a film screened with effects and dialogue tracks only—follow a predictable model: watchable blockbuster productions with strong intergenerational appeal. The prominence of science-fiction and fantasy-adventure films isn’t unusual given that so many of these superblockbuster films (already huge audience favourites) appeal to a nostalgic fondness across the board for old-fashioned family entertainment. The screenings of recent years illustrate this. In 2010, over two warm evenings in late September, the final instalment of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy The Return of the King was projected to audiences in the Royal Albert Hall over a live performance by the London Philharmonic (this itself concluded a small cycle of one-off annual events which began in 2009 with The Fellowship of the Ring); A Space Odyssey itself originally premiered at Festival Hall twelve months ago on June 25; this June, the R.P.O. continue their Film Music Gala at the Albert Hall with a farrago of greatest-hits cues taken from the populist works of Williams (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter), Zimmer (Gladiator) and in collaboration Badelt (Pirates of the Caribbean), Shore (The Lord of the Rings), and Horner (Avatar); and in October, Germany’s N.D.R. Radio Philharmonic perform Don Davis’ lame score for The Matrix, though I’m sceptical that even live accompaniment can scale the iconographic and immediately more gratifying sounds of the Propellerheads, Rage Against the Machine and Rob D. Classical musicians may finally differ on the artistic validity of these “special presentations,” and anyone who shares my interest in the performances of key orchestra players will know that a few onstage can at times appear thoroughly underwhelmed by the whole affair, some of them apparently dozing. But these projects, often mammoth undertakings requiring the assistance of the releasing studio to produce special prints, seem to delight us all and the best-remembered events of recent years have to my mind been at the Albert Hall.

While the setting for the L.P.O.’s performance of The Lord of the Rings was the world of mostly middle-aged, middlebrow, quiescent out-of-towners, A Space Odyssey opened against a clamorous but friendly backdrop of boozed-up city workers and thirtysomething wisecracking revellers, the village hall atmosphere and turbulent swell of the crowds on the sun-scorched Southbank in sharp contrast to the often sobering Friday night dash for taxis further west on the gloomy Kensington Road. In proof of the fact that things are indeed done differently here, patrons kicked over wine cups and doors clattered mid-performance, at times catching the attention of players onstage, which I suppose is an uncommon thing. Oh ho, yes things are different here. In the Albert Hall I recall the one light source of real note came from the conductor’s video monitor in the form of a series of coloured streamers and punches—visual aids which helped the conductor, on that occasion Ludwig Wicki, to keep tempo with the scenes (this was barely a distraction, so low beneath the projected image that it was shrouded in darkness, but it is one of the requirements nonetheless of conducting to picture). By contrast in Festival Hall, the resolution of the projected image was thinned out by the performers’ illuminated music stands, and much later during two of the film’s more intense sequences the Philharmonia settled back into a new darkness, which arrived from nowhere, for long (and completely natural) stretches of inactivity. What emerged was a conundrum. Was the film important? Was the stage important? Whether or not one attends these events to watch the film for all its subtle musical shades and powerful imagery—or alternatively the Philharmonia if one is concerned wholly with technique—is moot if aspects of the experience are determined beforehand by event organisers. We were to conceive of this event as neither cinema nor orchestration but instead something which engenders a new experience, one that precluded us all reclining in our chairs with an iPad in our hands and whistling for burgers. In this respect, the venue itself decided what it needed to give of two simultaneously running performances: orchestra over film, diegetic sound over choir, then film image over orchestral nothing. In other words, the concept of A Space Odyssey Live became simply, and collectively, “the event” and not as we’d expected “the film.” This kicked the notion, elegantly put forth by Jean Goudal, that “we are nothing but two eyes riveted to ten square metres of white sheet” when we attend a film screening square in the nuts.

In this condition, one had no choice but to largely avoid involvement with a film that couldn’t swamp the senses (a brutal realisation because I’d secured seats two rows from the front hoping to be involved in the film). All attention, therefore, went away from the screen and immediately on to the players. But this in itself was thoroughly worthwhile. The stand-out artist was Maya Iwabuchi. As principal of the first violin section and orchestra leader, Iwabuchi readied the orchestra in preparation for the film’s two overtures and led with a performance of quiet intensity, exhibiting overall a relaxed and intimate style that was technically compelling and continually encouraged (as well as rewarded) closer inspection; it was sometimes just as much fun to observe others keeping time with her (take for example Fiona Cornall in the second), as it was just to admire Iwabuchi’s painterly mannerisms and technique. Being seated not two rows away and positioned immediately in front of her as I was, it was some delight (at least to my untrained ears) to be able to pick out her lead from, say, the also excellent Imogen East or Choo Soong who were playing slightly to her left. Karen Stephenson (cello number two) was also an enjoyable presence onstage, as was Samantha Reagan and Jan Regulski of the second violins.

The Philharmonia Voices surprised us all, I think, with their portrayal of Ligeti’s mindfuck Requiem—I suspect there was nothing innovative or experimental about their performance, it was a faultless rendition (at least against my memory of the film), but in the flesh this cacophony of quivering voices from both sides of the stage, de Ridder delicately teasing out one layer from beneath the other, the requiem building until the female choir came to rest and the mad pitches of the male voices withered away into ringing silence, was enough to tip any drunk over the edge. Total heebie-jeebies. Characteristically audacious, Kubrick’s use of Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz in the docking of the Orion spacecraft sequence is always delightful and the Philharmonia were outstanding on both occasions of its use here. Finally, when the third caption appeared (“Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later”) and the adagio from Aram Khachaturian’s Gayaneh ballet suite began, many in the room, including myself, seemed to tense. A mix of dislocation, lyricism and absolute yearning, the adagio reinforced the notion of the “space odyssey” of the film’s title (as Peter Krämer puts it “a steady process of separation”)—this exploration, this sense, of what it means to be a lone traveller in a desolate landscape.

So there was no denying the emotional effects and the instrumental force of the music, nor the effectiveness of Iwabuchi and de Ridder’s (among others) performances. But although the Southbank Centre was good enough to partner with the B.F.I. and studio Warner Bros. on this one (with funding from the Royal Society), its understanding of “the event” as another real-world, real-life experience meant that the film sat alongside the orchestration, where in fairness I felt the orchestration should support and inform our experience, our feeling, primarily of the film. It may reflect old-school thinking on the part of the Southbank Centre. Still, with enough drink and a big grin the important things like details can blur into a haze, can’t they?

12 April, 2011

2011-03-12T18:26:00.007Z

The Korean Cinema Blogathon 2011

My contributions can be found on the New Korean Cinema site, where you can also see the links to all articles submitted for the Blogathon. In the first post of mine, “Film Music and Kim Jee-woon: A Bittersweet Life Soundtrack,” I touch on the significance of the music soundtrack in the films of Kim Jee-woon. In the second, I review the thunking clunking teenage gangshow that is Lee Jae-han’s combat film, 71 Into the Fire.

2011-02-09T18:26:00.007Z

Banner Collection for the upcoming Korean Blogathon 2011

The Korean Cinema Blogathon will be kicking off on March 7th and running for a week. It offers a great chance to pool together some global chatter, thoughts, discussion, reviews and literally anything else that comes to mind on one of the world's most important and still exciting film industries. Details can be found on the dedicated Facebook page, and you can also keep up to date with things via the excellent New Korean Cinema, and cineAWESOME! websites.

I'm presenting here a few of the banner designs I worked up for the event, some of which can be downloaded via the Facebook page if you feel like joining the fun! ...

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2011-02-09T18:25:00.004Z

Banner Collection for the upcoming 2011 Korean Blogathon

And some square banners (medium). The flicks, left to right: The Good, The Bad, The Weird (Kim Jee-woon, 2008), Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009), The Servant (Kim Dae-woo, 2010), and You Are My Sunshine (Park Jin-pyo, 2005) ...

Three skyscraper half-page banners. The movies, left to right: The Housemaid (Im Sang-soo, 2010), The Servant (Kim Dae-woo, 2010), and Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009) ...

Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009) ...

2011-02-09T18:21:00.001Z

Banner Collection for the upcoming 2011 Korean Blogathon

Finally, some leaders. The flicks, left to right: Shiri (Kang Je-gyu, 1999), Secret Reunion (Jang Hoon, 2010), Treeless Mountain (Kim So-yong, 2008), The Good, The Bad, The Weird (Kim Jee-woon, 2008), I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (Park Chan-wook, 2006), Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2005), and Samaritan Girl (Kim Ki-duk, 2004) ...

Aaron Sorkin Q & A The Social Network B.F.I. Southbank

2011-01-29T19:46:00.018Z

That Does Look Like Fun ... The Aaron Sorkin Invasion Continues

EVENT THE SOCIAL NETWORK + AARON SORKIN Q & A VENUE THE B.F.I. SOUTHBANK

I’m in the small core who have some reservations about The Social Network. Not in soundtrack terms, the score very definitely owned 2010, so no argument there; just, not the screenplay. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable (read: a twat): the third act is a rooster tail of wrap-ups which knock off every character except Zuckerberg in ways the previous acts don’t earn; some of the characterisation I squarely couldn’t give a rat’s ass for; and a lot of the Palo Alto stuff (the “Was that a parable?” / “This is our time” scene notwithstanding, because it’s a knockout) does read like TV. So, no, the screenplay isn’t quite of a par with Chayefsky. And to claim as Sorkin has that the story—the founding of Facebook and the testimonies of the chief complainants who filed lawsuits against its C.E.O.—would be of interest to Shakespeare or *blink* Aeschylus is, well, you decide if we should lay the smack down on him for that one.

The above does at least explain why it made little sense to me that The Script Factory (a development house which for fifteen years has offered basic training for prospective screenwriters in Western Europe) was co-presenting the Q & A—in its structuring and presentation this was your archetypal celebrity interview and not quite a screenwriting brainstorm, a round of appropriate and familiar questions therefore that steered around the topic of writing, process and tasking (so it was more of a “this is a wordy script isn’t it?” party than an “about these compromises with the Zuckerberg/Sean Parker/Narendra/Winklevoss/Christy Lee characters, tell me more” deal); on the other hand, none of that explains in the end why I enjoyed the whole darn evening so much at the B.F.I. For one, Sorkin is an authoritative voice whenever he’s nervous (his admission), so he’s well-rehearsed, which means his comments are always adroit and on point, which also means that he is basically repeating everything you’ve heard on Wittertainment or seen on Collider or Wmag, making this literally the same interview, but okay, fine; secondly, Francine Stock, always a fine master of ceremonies, made several good enquiries, placing the film in the context of Zuckerberg’s relationship with Erica, acknowledging multiple logics at work in the Hollywood industry, and underscoring the disruptive power of the film’s opening scene, a sequence which cuts right through the commonplace routines of cinema spectatorship (to which the catchy response, “[opening] scenes which require you to start running to catch up with the movie … are good”); thirdly, The Social Network ends on “Baby You’re A Rich a Man,” which pretty much puts me in a good mood for anything; and perhaps most welcome of all, Sorkin is a fun, sharp, and endearing speaker. In the space of forty minutes he paid lip service to Seurat (he claimed that between Seurat's distinctive mode of French Post-Impressionism and modern storytelling there are conceptually few barriers), Peter Shaffer, his Equus and Amadeus specifically, The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, France/U.K.) screenwriter Peter Morgan, journalist George Crile, cellist/virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma, and the Hollywood satire Entourage; he joked about the development executive’s prerogative as opposed to the writer’s and hence the commercial imperatives of Hollywood, lampooning a fantasy scenario in which notes are returned to him requesting a “scene of Mark saving a drowning child” or “Mark when he’s twelve years old being stuffed into his locker” (you know, for the sake of empathy); he described himself as an “outsider, shy and awkward in social situations,” and believes that modern celebrity culture is “fundamentally wrong and bad for us, [turning] us into meaner people.”

In his digressions a note or two on the state of package production in today’s conglomerated industry stimulated some curiosity: for one, both Sony and Random House appear to have mobilised behind The Social Network and Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires—The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal with some force, cognisant of the fact that neither are particularly timeless entities. Towards the end of the evening, Sorkin seemed genuinely upbeat about Sony’s future with Zuckerberg, pointing out that the connections his screenplay makes with the man are reasonable, and observing that, “you’re not gonna play it fast and loose with people’s lives.” Finally he returned to the idea of false light and defamation in cinematic works of fiction. “If [as a writer] your moral compass is broken for some reason,” he mused, “there is the Sony legal department to help you out. This script is vetted by a legal team who could not fit inside this theatre. We’re talking about a group of people who have demonstrated they’re not opposed to suing anyone and who have the resources to spend you to death. If I had said something that was untrue and defamatory you would know it because Mark Zuckerberg would own Sony right now.” Which isn't ... wholly accurate. As several entertainment lawyers have stated on their own websites, deposing Mark Zuckerberg again today could potentially cause more damage than either Sorkin and Fincher's film, or Mezrich's book. Still, it's a fun note to end on.

21 January, 2011

127 Hours (Danny Boyle, 2011)

2011-01-10T19:55:00.008Z

Every Second Counts

FILM 127 HOURS DIRECTOR DANNY BOYLE

“I’m a big believer that we are all bound together,” begins Danny Boyle, his tentative response to an audience question at last night’s Q & A at the B.F.I. Southbank. “Not in a hippie way, but it’s why we live in cities, why we don’t go and live in monkish isolation, and I believe those forces … connect and protect us all.” In the humble auditorium of N.F.T.1, the reverence generally accorded to Boyle as one of the finest British filmmakers of the last quarter century held firm. His latest project, 127 Hours, reworks canyoneer Aron Ralston’s world famous story of self-rescue in the Utah desert with a spin that points up not just the director’s enthusiasm for playing with form and style, but his own personal alacrity. I’ve seen Boyle a couple of times at these events, and in each he has suited the occasion, flattening out any prudish British reserve which hangs over in his audience after a screening, and with confidence involving one and all in the general conversation. Joined by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and producer Christian Colson, he discussed 127 Hours’ strong social and to a lesser degree political themes, his collaboration with Indian musician A. R. Rahman, and tantalisingly his belief that camera operation as a skill is more critical than lighting in the service of meaning. Typically for Boyle, whereas cinematographic lighting (akin to a symbolic act) produces one effect in the filmgoer, the camera’s function is to probe, and to question, and to respond with an actor; in fashioning a cinema that is “obsessive” and so wedded to human experience almost in terms of physical proximity he aims to capture some of the mechanisms of thought and perhaps the spontaneity of feeling.

His film, opening in Aron’s apartment but set almost exclusively thereafter in the dreaded Canyonlands National Park, begins with a slideshow of images. Marathon runners baking in the sun, a packed thousand-seater stadium, crowded escalators, and commuters filing onto already teeming subways; the film keeps at hand these and other unbearable public scenarios as references for civilisation and humanity, civilisation as a comfortably remote army of bodies, the throng which we all struggle to get out from under. Meanwhile, in a foreshadowing of what’s to come the protagonist hastily fills his water bottle at the kitchen sink while Free Blood sing “Never Hear Surf Music Again” on the soundtrack. So begins Danny Boyle’s biographical misadventure, which lays bare the extent of Aron Ralston’s five-day ordeal in the isolated Blue John canyon, starved, dehydrated, and pinned to the wall by an immovable 800lb boulder. As the weekend passes, Aron’s many escape attempts fail, he aborts one amputation, and his psychological condition worsens. Using a digital camera, he films his deterioration in a series of daily recordings which become increasingly apologetic. Heartbroken and his supplies depleted, Aron finally accepts his fate. On his fifth day, suffering from an intense fever as well as frequent prophetic hallucinations, he amputates his arm below the elbow in a surgical operation which lasts a little under an hour. Weakened from the stresses of his ordeal, he fashions a makeshift sling for his arm, crawls out of the canyon, rappels down a 60-foot wall, and hikes five miles through the desert until he's spotted. In the company of three fellow hikers he issues a personal plea for help, and is flown by helicopter to Allen Memorial Hospital.

By Boyle’s own frank admission, James Franco’s Aron is “a bit of a tosser.” He finds bliss in silence and emptiness, goes out of his way in fact to engage with it, then runs roughshod over the Canyonlands terrain by cycle and on foot, brain and heart we presume dulled to the aesthetic pleasures both of freedom and adventure; his brain is instead caught up in the sensory overload of physical adventure and (so the diegesis infers) the patterns of musical experience stirred by the pounding in his earphones. The setting is wonderful, the light above all incredible, but its enchantments, though clearly once within his comprehension, seem secondary to the pursuits that amuse/awaken him; he may well have fled the city but operates still on its highly reflexive level, organising data, scheduling his runs, substituting city noise for mp3s. The division of the screen into a split-panel frame clearly spells out this message (after enough repetition of this technique, the multi-purpose frame assumes the characteristics of a digital interface, like a screen displaying only open web browsers, each one recycling and streaming relevant information for an over-consumptive mind); but it also distorts the horizontal photographic image, it thins out the landscape, coercing our eye into tracing something that is, for a while, idiosyncratic and behavioural.

With this Boyle illuminates a point: frivolity, mischief, arrogance, self-interest are pure character. That arrogance is an American speciality particularly is a little unhelpful and old-fashioned as a viewpoint, but it is one that Boyle has almost certainly considered and probably welcomes in any commentary. His personal suggestion that Aron’s story is quintessentially American, and Aron the quintessential American, is on the other hand a right and an earnest point but one that’s hard to warm to. Boyle sees in Aron’s story an allegory for U.S. foreign policy, and his thesis is that the film highlights the danger of a global superpower turning its back on collaboration to enforce more fiercely a policy of bourgeois individualism/egotism. His comment at the previous evening’s Q & A that, “It’s only when America embraces the whole world, when it sees outside [its own borders] that it’s a magnificent country—as it is, as it can be,” sounds like a well rehearsed line, and although the linking of his argument to the current “showdown” in the U.S. between the Republicans, backed by Tea Party drones, and the Democrats amused both the panel and audience, the point was left respectfully hanging.

That the film works so well is largely down to the resourcefulness of Aron himself and an almost inscrutable performance from Franco. This is a hero (Boyle calls him a “superhero” in a nod to the press attention which Aron’s story garnered internationally) who can fashion a tourniquet from a hydration pack and rig his ropes and climbing gear to winch a boulder, but who has no idea how punishing and difficult life already is without either a support network, or (because he is lucky enough) some family, to look out for him. As Aron, sporting the same blue cap, crimson T-shirt and silver earphones familiar from the canyoneer’s own photographs, James Franco gives a real sense of how this man’s independence and confidence in himself is suddenly shot by the embarrassment of his mistake, the look of stranded relief in his eyes rarely betraying full despair in his most intimate scenes—only loss, of pride and of self-image. This is an excellent performance. Whenever scenes call for a personal address to camera (and there are many) the DeNiro-esque veneer (present in that supercilious stare) slips away, and a real sense of shared amusement with his (imagined) audience shines through. It just seems a pity Boyle’s film can’t adopt a more conciliatory, and hence settled, tone. Accepting that audience empathy with Aron’s predicament is very much a given from the outset, Beaufoy’s script (co-written with the director) leads to an appreciation of a banal “epiphany,” which authorises the self-amputation, via a collection of memory fragments: sentimental (and I felt unnecessary) distractions which overcompensate for the fixed setting and the story’s swing towards existentialism.

Thus, the film becomes a skein of phantasms and illusions, memories and visions, a cat’s cradle almost for the seemingly endless games played on common reality by hallucination as Aron’s health deteriorates further. This descent into fantasy, illusion and delusion seems entirely consistent with the Boyle oeuvre; the real-time horror of Aron’s flash-flood fantasy, for instance, a pivotal sequence conjuring memories of an ex lover brought on by his sheer thirst for water, recalls the agony of Renton’s detoxification scene in Trainspotting (1996, UK), the tracing of Rana’s fingers over Aron’s skin as they lay in bed together just as powerful as the encroaching baby that looms over Renton’s deathbed. But whereas that film’s fantasy sequences take us to the savage depths of Renton’s subconscious, as do Richard’s hyperactive videogame hallucinations in The Beach (2000, USA/UK), in this Aron’s flights of fancy are allied to the things he envisages in a state of calm, reflection, detachment, etc.; they are closer in style and tone therefore to the closing dazzling moments of Sunshine (2007, UK/USA)—the single moment in fact prior to the unimaginable solar event, which that film selects (to quote Lessing in his Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) for “immutable permanence from art.” For a long time I held in my memory a lasting image of this sequence which was unlike anything I’ve seen since on repeat viewings of the film; unrealised onscreen, but acted on, extended, and completed in memory, it resembled the fleeting moment as described by Lessing. Like many works of contemporary Hollywood which offer a glimpse of what it must be like to move, at least photographically, closer towards the mind (and hence to our acts of memory), the visions and “episodes”-cum-epiphanies of 127 Hours are strictly formal by comparison, comprising that is of slightly obvious common experiences (remembering a past event) shared via the traditional language of cinema. Though well observed and offering I imagine for some powerful emotional identification with Aron at his (spiritually) strongest point, the film’s recourse to warm, fluffy images offers disappointingly little support for Boyle’s stated aim which is to unlearn the laws and ideas associated with classical cinema by frequently testing genre models. He captures I think the timelessness of memory well, the abrupt and transient appearance of visions equally so—but in truth these comments and others like it are pleasantries which help us to move beyond or simply overlook the political challenge which Boyle has set himself. So I’m reminded of a passage from The Alchemy of the Eye, quoting Gilbert-Lecomte: “the Himalayas can appear in the stone of a ring, a train can turn around a man’s head, a posse in the Far West and the swell of the sea occur on a sleeper’s pillow … a drama is played out on a blackened fingernail.”

7 January, 2011

The London Korean Film Festival 2010

2010-11-28T12:56:00.018Z

No Room at the Barbican ... Korean Film Back in the West End

EVENT THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2010 VENUE O.W.E., APOLLO PICCADILLY, I.C.A.

Around these parts, around this blog, the Korean Film Festival (L.K.F.F.) is a big deal. It has four U.S.Ps: dedicated audiences, constructive analysis, old-fashioned goodie bags, and a short collection of critical essays awaiting publication in the wings. This year, it screened eighteen films, hosted six Q & A sessions with prominent figures, had good visibility in three West End venues, and as far as I can tell had zero restrictions on admission at the point of purchase (yes, B.F.I. London Film Festival, that’s a dig at you). It handled its constraints and compromises admirably well, making it easy for visitors to attend all the screenings they wanted, and it covered nearly every one of the year’s top ten grossing films. Its only flaw was the shunting into the I.C.A.’s ugly theatre space and tiny screening room of such festival highlights as Jang Hoon’s Secret Reunion, Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid and a panel discussion chaired by Tony Rayns. I hear the excellent Barbican is going to take until 2012 to build its two new film auditoriums, so if majority cinemas like the Odeon and V.U.E. (even the prestigious Empire) continue to refuse semi-art-house showcases on financing terms, then the festival’s options in forthcoming years are split between two locations: primarily the Southbank (the N.F.T.) and the West End (the Piccadilly Apollo and the I.C.A.). I’m not necessarily a fan of the commercial zing of the Square. A big advantage of the Barbican is that it is an arts complex, with plenty of foyer, bar and function room space to chat with filmmakers, festival programmers, and just about anybody else who’s at a screening; with limited space to do anything of the sort at the primary West End locations (except outside in the street with a cold cigarette), the festival missed the arts centre this year, we missed the arts centre. Still, the L.K.F.F. positions itself fundamentally as a way to promote Korean culture and tourism, and the skill with which it has leveraged its current position in the U.K. with quality screenings (Yang Ik-joon’s Breathless took ownership of the L.K.F.F. 09) and high-profile directors is pretty damn commendable.

In this, the L.K.F.F. is surprisingly international—which makes it hard to believe the whole enterprise is only in its fifth year. It's a festival, of course, and not an exhibition, so the expense necessitates the involvement of stars, state institutions, the press, and *blink* celebrity advocates. The appearances of directors Lee Jeong-beom and Kim Jee-woon continued this tradition, and in that sense their films—Lee’s The Man From Nowhere (2010), and Kim’s I Saw the Devil (2010)—were marketed both as pulp enticements and important cultural signifiers. I saw both and neither struck a chord with originality, but such is the messy curatorial business of film selection. Lee’s The Man From Nowhere shared some common virtues with lesser known, social agenda films on the programme—via its commentary on human trafficking and organ harvesting—but Kim's I Saw the Devil was hands down (I hope through no real fault of his own) the director’s weakest film. This said, the prestige Kim lends the festival as one of the top directors in Korean cinema is absolutely indispensable, and his popularity here in the city probably far greater than he realises. Elsewhere, the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ effort to support and manage the bulk of the L.K.F.F.’s screenings was welcomed—its café/bar a decent place to catch up with others, the cinema reasonable enough to fit in Im Sang-soo’s Q & A—but the venue for the roundtable sucked: the theatre space was still set up for amdram, advertising stands came in late, and for good measure the seating was 1000 times worse than high school. But the topic—the future of the Korean film industry—was wholly prescient. In the last five years, the production of multi-purpose would-be blockbusters has bolstered commercial cinema, deepening anxieties regarding the promotion of domestic independent filmmakers and the sustainability of New Korean Cinema. Rayns, Simon Ward and mainstream filmmaker Jang Jin considered many aspects of the film business, including the present distribution system after the old lines collapsed, sources of financing for independents, and the merits of the Korean Film Council (K.O.F.I.C.)—a state-funded organisation which, for Jang at least, is having little success fostering artistic experimentation via its promotion, theatrical distribution and direct funding initiatives. In fairness, though, K.O.F.I.C. surely is about helping budding student filmmakers with short films and independents that can play internationally more than anything else? Bringing things back to the festival itself, Ward discussed the role of the Independent Cinema Office (I.C.O.) and particularly its association with K.O.F.I.C. and the Korean Cultural Centre in composing a viable film programme.

The addition of the Piccadilly Apollo on the list of venues showed the organisers’ ambition to enhance the L.K.F.F.’s image as a prestigious, cosmopolitan event. Consequently, crossing La Galleria Pall Mall to the mini-club atmosphere of the Apollo was some antidote to the I.C.A.: intelligent lighting system, relaxed lounge rooms, reflective surfaces, I’ll bet the place has a late night license too. For this opulent setting, the festival organisers mounted a Jang Jin retrospective. Jang’s visibility as a “pivotal voice” in Korean cinema (though amusingly he himself proposed “mysterious creature” as a more fitting description) is certainly less clear to audiences in the U.K.—particularly to those for whom Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-soo’s distinction has already been well confirmed—but his films, nonetheless, helped to differentiate this year’s festival from those of previous years, tactfully guiding our eye away from auteur showmen like Bong Joon-ho (2009) and Park Chan-wook (2007) if only to deposit us in the fairly mainstream realm of the black comedy, satirical thriller and the romcom. The exhibition featured Guns & Talks (2001), the sweetly comic Someone Special (2004), Murder Take One (a.k.a., The Big Scene, 2005) which screened at the L.K.F.F.’s inaugural launch four years ago, and Good Morning President (2009), a film which outgrossed Park Chan-wook’s Thirst at last year’s box office. In this, the festival’s reputation was well deserved, due to its close co-ordination of the four screenings with post-film Q & A sessions and film-specific introductions by the director.

Of this, however, there can be no doubt: the festival badly needs women. Oh, yes. See, I don’t mind attending the retrospectives, I dig the high-profile visits too, but between Jang, Kim, Im, Lee Jeong-beom, Ahn Jae-hoon, Simon Field, Simon Ward, Tony Rayns, Jonathan Ross and the South Korean ambassador popping in to wish us all the best, festival priorities are unreservedly edging out the girl guests in this equation. So this year’s spotlight category included a feature on leading ladies—the four films being Harmony (dir. Kang Dae-gyu, 2010), The Servant (dir. Kim Dae-woo, 2010), Bedevilled (dir. Jang Cheol-soo, 2010) which I think was screened earlier this summer at FrightFest, and the most relevant, Paju (dir. Park Chan-ok, 2009)—but to my knowledge Han Hye-jin, the co-director on the animated Green Days (co-dir. Ahn Jae-hoon, with whom Ahn runs Studio M.W.P.), was the only woman promoting Korean cinema this year. On the face of it, rare opportunities might have passed this Autumn to involve international star Kim Yoon-jin (Harmony) or the awesomely talented Jeon Do-yeon (The Housemaid), but as the press gambits for both films ended long ago (they screened in January and May respectively) nothing much was going to happen on that front. This is going to change, right? If the L.K.F.F. is to continue revamping itself and consolidate its position alongside the London Film Festival as one of the finest film cultural events in this city—and it deserves its reputation—then perhaps it can turn to film actresses like, for instance, Yum Jung-ah and Bae Doo-na. As cultural ambassadors with interests that extend beyond cinema, both actresses would change the mindset of future festivalgoers. For the better.

28 November, 2010

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I Saw the Devil (Kim Jee-Woon, South Korea, 2010)

2010-11-15T12:14:00.011Z

Battle Not With Monsters ...

FILM I SAW THE DEVIL DIRECTOR KIM JEE WOON

Noteworthy for being the first feature in which Kim Jee-woon has no direct writing credit (and less so for the seven cuts which were dutifully made to appease the Korea Media Rating Board, a story which is publicised anywhere the film plays internationally), I Saw the Devil is an undeniably engaging thriller, thanks in no small part to the slapstick mannerisms of lead actor Choi Min-sik and the streetwise populism of megastar Lee Byeong-heon. The film’s formidable pairing of internationally renowned stars, its relatively high profile crew including Lee Mo-gae (who also shot this year’s Secret Reunion, in addition to Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters and T.G.T.B.T.W.) and Nam Na-young (who has edited mainstream works like Castaway on the Moon, Insadong Scandal, and The Doll Master), its spotless production values and big budget (the reported $6 million is extraordinary, even for the mainstream) immediately suggest a multi-purpose event movie, a highly marketable package which its makers hope will capitalise on international territories, rekindle industry fortunes in light of a poor 2009 and emulate the benchmark status of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003). But if I Saw the Devil is indeed intended as a blockbuster then it’s a curious one with a far from expansive audience. The casting of Lee in the lead role of Kim Soo-hyeon is the only concession to a female demographic, and though a fair load of Korean girls seem to dig the violence and pain associated with the genre, the film plays overwhelmingly to us guys. Even in Korea, where it was distributed by Showbox, the marketing aestheticised the bloody conflict between the two stars, pairing them off in tight smoky close-ups, and barely noting the presence of other cast members. Crucially, I Saw the Devil premiered this August in Korea one week after its biggest rival, Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man From Nowhere, and it has not measured at all well since in aesthetic, critical or financial terms—this despite the reappearance of its major star (Choi Min-sik) after a five year screen absence.

It should, perhaps, be more notable for its central Nietzschian conceit—motivated by a need to punish the man who murdered his fiancée and then desecrated her body, the film’s protagonist embarks on a ruthless campaign of vigilantism which transforms him ultimately into the object of his own obsessive rage. I Saw the Devil opens with the discovery by the roadside of a stranded car and a vicious assault on its sole occupant, Joo-yeon (Oh San-ha). Her assailant, Kyeong-cheol (Choi), snatches her body from the scene and returns her to his lair where she is summarily executed, dismembered and the body parts deposited by a culvert shortly thereafter. However, it turns out that Joo-yeon’s fiancé Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee) is a highly skilled and well-regarded federal agent; with the Chief’s unspoken blessing, Soo-hyeon vows to hunt down the culprit and seek violent revenge against him. Thus his reason for tracking Kyeong-cheol is already a spurious one: convinced that Joo-yeon’s execution was itself a meaningless and predatory act, he requires neither a rational explanation nor necessarily a confession from the man responsible; he will instead merely administer his own punishment, matching brute force with brute force. When Soo-hyeon finally overcomes his prey in the film’s key setpiece (a much publicised night sequence shot in a series of greenhouses), he tags Kyeong-cheol with a sensor, breaks one of his hands, and then leaves him in his own burial plot, ostensibly to die but in truth to recover. It is only after he has fully regained his composure and been tempted to assault another that Soo-hyeon next intervenes, a decision, partly judicious, which endows his vengeance-driven acts of violence with a peculiar moral quality.

On this very theme, Park Hoon-jung’s script plays fast and loose with an assortment of morally superior and inferior characters. On the one hand are those innocents who are overpowered by unimaginable evil, like Soo-hyeon and Joo-yeon, who are in many ways the contented couple happy with their lot before Kyeong-cheol tears them apart; in addition, there are Soo-hyeon’s father-in-law, ex-Squad Chief Jang (Jeon Gook-hwan), and his sister-in-law Se-yeon (Kim Yoon-seo), both virtuous people who implore him not to take revenge and risk throwing the family further into turmoil; and Han Song-I (Yoon Chae-yeong), a nurse working in the practice of the old doctor (Kim Jae-geon) who treats Kyeong-cheol after his first showdown with Soo-yeon. Fleshing out the pathological element of the film are the first two suspects on Soo hyeon’s hit list, Jjang-goo (Yoon Byeong-hee) and the unnamed cyclist (Kil Geum-seong); two taxi burglars (Lee Seol-goo and Jeong Mi-nam) who opportunistically prey on hitchhikers in the night; Kyeong-cheol’s old buddy, Tae-joo (Choi Moo-seong), a cannibal whose pathology is never really explained (though he fits the cinematic tradition of the now obsolete slaughterhouse worker); and Tae-joo’s insane accomplice Se-jeong (Kim In-seo). As this short list demonstrates, I Saw the Devil is acute in presenting a range of virtues and vices for a distinct range of character types, not individuals. This places added pressure on actor Lee Byeong-heon who must work doubly hard to convey his character’s transformation from devastated victim to haunted perpetrator through several key exchanges with his animalistic adversary. For his part, Choi seems to be in his element (though no way near his best), trumping Robert De Niro’s sweaty Max Cady from Cape Fear (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1991) with a technically brilliant performance that bizarrely sees him meting out remorseless forms of punishment in one scene and in the next tumbling from his car like a startled Foghorn Leghorn.

Since Choi’s Kyeong-cheol is classified as irredeemably psychotic from the outset, tension in the picture can only and does ultimately stem from those vengeful cinematic moments which appear to codify Soo-hyeon, the “good” man in this equation, as psychotic—at least in the tradition of these typically “Korean”/Shakespearean serial-killer films. It therefore follows a line of thrillers, procedurals and horrors—Nowhere to Hide (dir. Lee Myung-se, 1999), Park’s Vengeance trilogy (2002/2003/2005), A Bittersweet Life (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2005), A Bloody Aria (dir. Won Shin-yeon, 2006), Beautiful Sunday (dir. Jin Kwang-gyo, 2007), The Chaser (dir. Na Hong-jin, 2008), The Man From Nowhere, even an icy drama like Yang Ik-joon’s sterling Breathless (2009)—which both renounce traditional distinctions of good and evil, and debunk the myth that violence can be in any way constructive or personally rewarding. As portrayed in this movie, vengeance distorts and disorients the hero ethically; I suspect it is not necessarily the monster that Soo-hyeon fears becoming, but that other state of being: isolated and widowed; heart-broken and alone. Soo-hyeon will fully crave the attention again of his soul-mate long after the credits have rolled and Kyeong-cheol’s body found, but Joo-yeon will never answer him, his faith in prayer will diminish year upon year, and so too his sense of purpose. What interests me about this film, then, is that the desire which drives Soo-hyeon to sadism and brutality does not destroy him—this experience, this course of action, while indescribably harrowing, lacking any semblance of a cathartic resolution, and almost certainly tarnishing the man forever, is in some way necessary. It, therefore, detracts from the well-acknowledged pattern of the films noted above by shifting the emphasis away from salvation, and in a sense vengeance itself as an abstract concept, onto two core ideas instead: mechanical ritual, and mutual identification.

In order for Soo-hyeon to truly experience and release grief he must revert to a truer nature. The film, therefore, taps into the mechanical act of the ritual itself to make its point: vengeance, in this context, can serve a purpose; rather than free Soo-hyeon from grief, it frees him to grieve. The memorable climactic shot in which Lee’s Soo-hyeon is seen wandering aimlessly in Kyeong-cheol’s neighbourhood utterly consumed by unbearable sorrow is an interesting one. Has the terrible nature of his obsession at last hit home? Or does he despair for his own salvation? I trust that neither concern matters to him; he grieves for Joo-yeon. The only other vengeance film to touch on a similar theme is the truly harrowing masterpiece, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a film which ultimately has more to say on the reality and pain of grief than anything produced here.

14 November, 2010

Kim Jee Woon at the London Korean Film Festival 2010

2010-11-15T12:03:00.005Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT KIM JEE WOON VENUE THE ODEON WEST END

EVENT KIM JEE WOON WRAPPING THINGS UP IN A SPECIAL I SAW THE DEVIL Q&A,
LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL SPECIAL PREVIEW 6 NOVEMBER 2010

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Lee Jeong-beom at the London Korean Film Festival 2010

2010-11-15T12:02:00.003Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT LEE JEONG-BEOM VENUE THE ODEON WEST END

EVENT THE MAN FROM NOWHERE Q&A WITH DIRECTOR LEE JEONG-BEOM,
LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL OPENING GALA 5 NOVEMBER 2010

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Jang Jin at the London Korean Film Festival 2010

2010-11-15T12:00:00.008Z

In Photographs

DIRECTOR JANG JIN VENUE THE I.C.A.

EVENT JANG JIN DISCUSSING THE FUTURE OF KOREAN CINEMA,
LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL PANEL DISCUSSION 11 NOVEMBER 2010

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Currently Cannot Live Without ... These Five Music Cues From My O.S.T. Collection

2010-11-06T00:20:00.050Z

Currently Cannot Live Without ...

THESE 5 MUSIC CUES IN MY O.S.T. COLLECTION

In September I was fortunate enough to watch the London Philharmonic Orchestra perform the score live for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), a wonderful memory, in honour of which I am writing this. With that half-assed explanation out of the way, here are my five favourite O.S.T. cues currently playing on shuffle.

5. A Familiar Taste (The Social Network)

In 1999, the Dust Brothers combined industrial effects and unorthodox musical instruments to propel forward their multi-layered Fight Club score, but for The Social Network, an album alike in technique, Fincher teamed finally with Trent Reznor whose outstanding work on The Downward Spiral with N.I.N. yielded several variations of the track, “Closer,” the most savage of which, “Precursor,” appears over Se7en’s demented title sequence. These albums are appropriate to “A Familiar Taste” because they establish a context that isn’t immediately (or even ever) apparent in The Social Network itself—a film about a computer-scientist. I flit between cues like “Hand Covers Bruise” (perfectly evoking memories of lonely Autumn evenings in the city), “Intriguing Possibilities” (a sort of electronic paean to the brittle essence of cyberspace) and “Complication with Optimistic Outcome” (sort of like that too, though perhaps more of a paean to Blade Runner), but I return always to the filthier, sexier “A Familiar Taste.” The cue appears in its original, longer cut as "35 Ghosts IV" on the Ghosts I-IV double album (Fincher tuned into the album big time when he was working on Zodiac), but used here in The Social Network it transforms the film’s underscoring almost into a force.

4. Day of the River (Spirited Away)

I love Miyazaki’s Spirited Away; and if my memories are overtaken, as they're sure to be, a part of me will always love it. I’m in thrall to its purity—the purity of landscape, of mood and character, of Chihiro’s capricious, flawed and stumbling personality. The moment, animated by Miyazaki, when Chihiro ties back her hair and puts it into a band is so precise it just melts you; and likewise, her plaintive stare across the ocean as, from the bathhouse balcony, she sees a train running along the surface of the water: the exhausted worker, legs aching and eyes burning, indulging for a moment in the wonder of fantasy.

At the outset, composer Joe Hisaishi establishes a celestial mood, a cue designed to interest the imagination before a simple piano melody brings us back again to character. Chihiro has just been reacquainted with her transmogrified parents in a pig-pen, where they are being lined up for slaughter; horrified, Chihiro vows to save them, and then flees outside into the arms of Haku who cheers her up with a generous offering of rice. Here, the melody is swept into full ensemble: a child once again in our eyes, she devours the food before breaking down into a pathetic wail (also an action animated by Miyazaki), the delicate switch back to a few instruments a fleeting reminder of just how much sorrow this girl is bottling up. In this way, the score never indulges in sentiment or whimsy, it always looks forward, it always digs deep down and shares the same spirit. Enthused again to try harder, Chihiro runs across the bridge to the bathhouse, the invisible No Face observing everything. Then, awakening himself from slumber, Kamaji the old boiler man reaches all the way across the room to slide a blanket over Chihiro who’s now tucked herself into a sleeping ball beside the soot-slaves that shift all the coal. Here, Hisaishi’s cue holds on the lullaby melody, dipping out prematurely, as if to deprive us of closure.

3. The Angel (Lust, Caution)

Though only a short track (at little over two minutes), this one calls upon Lust Caution’s signature, “Wong Chia Chi’s Theme,” which is brought to the fore in full isolation and in more generic terms a little later on in the album. “The Angel” is the more deeply felt I think and artfully arranged, and as used both in the film (towards its conclusion) and on Alexandre Desplat’s album it just gets me right where I live. The track begins deceptively warm, a fairytale told as memory; at a little under midway it swells to the romantic vision of Wong’s generic theme, but critically the motif doesn’t hold, as if it can’t believe in the possibility of love, or in the grace of time, only in love’s inherent contradictions and in the tricks of memory; breathless the theme intones to her friends, to her allies, to us that Wong is well and truly lost. The delayed notes passing over the piano invoke a life that is never meant to be; and thus diminished, closed-in and doomed, Wong embraces her fate, head bowed and with eyes shut.

2. Sky Lounge (A Bittersweet Life)

Perhaps the place to begin this one is with Kim Jee-woon’s key collaborations in recent years. For A Tale of Two Sisters, the Korean director worked with the prolific Lee Byung-woo, in whose great musical care Kim originally entrusted his Three segment, Memories (Lee has since scored for such whopping genre movies as The Red Shoes, The Host, Voice of a Murderer, Hansel & Gretel, Mother and Haeundae); for the positively bonkers The Good, The Bad, The Weird (a score so indiscriminate and unshackled that it genrifies for its key setpiece Nina Simone’s touching “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”—quite an ostentatious move), Kim collaborated with Jang Yeong-gyu and Dalpalan, and for their efforts both were nominated in the Composers category at the 3rd Asian Film Awards (they lost out, not unjustly, to Joe Hisaishi). But before this, the pair worked together on Kim’s Girl-That-Got-Away revenge thriller, A Bittersweet Life, and produced an imitative though not unchallenging score which shouldn’t be so easily overlooked. On this, Jang and Dalpalan were joined importantly by Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki, who recorded the film’s critical music cue entitled “Romance” on the album, and in addition sampled the work of the late classical guitarist Francisco Tarrega, whose performance of “Etude in E Minor” brings a sense of small-scale intimacy and heritage to Kang and Baek’s criminal underworld.

The album’s themes do a fine job of encapsulating different aspects of the film. These include our hero Sun Woo’s loyalty to Kang, the romantic melody for Hee Soo (the girl he shadows), the very culture of femininity which she embodies and which is still unique to Sun Woo, the besieging of Kang by “friendly” enemies, the slapstick fun to be had with Myung-gu and Mikhail, the vengeance theme which pushes the confrontation with Kang in the hotel’s Sky Lounge, and finally, Sun Woo’s relationship with his own reflection and image, a motif which the director endows with great importance. In its simplicity, “Follow” for instance characterises the spark of wonder which initially takes hold of Sun Woo, the purposeful rhythm of it repeating again and again as he drives into the city, the erotic undertone of the theme surfacing towards the close as he observes Hee Soo dancing in a busy club with her lover. The cue of “Romance” is based on the source music to which Hee Soo later plays cello accompaniment, and though the motif is never once repeated on the album it nevertheless finds corresponding value in the themes of “Irreversible Time,” its reprise “(Quartet) Irreversible Time” and “Fairness.”

So while I can’t deny outright the streamlined elegance that is “Follow” or (a track I haven’t even mentioned yet) the seductive “Escape” which is powered by a detached and utterly primal sense of survivalism, I’m going with “Sky Lounge” for my favourite on the album, the film’s introductory music cue. It’s difficult to explain how and in what way this theme so perfectly complemented my own sense of discovery when I first watched this film, if only because the cue’s main job is to reciprocate relatively “insubstantial” themes of vanity and human remoteness and I guess that wouldn’t reflect too well on me if I admitted some sort of kinship there. But vanity is the key theme, virtually every frame in this sequence is gorgeous, the grooming impeccable, and it benefits greatly from the presence of the music: from the eponymous Sky Lounge of the title, where Sun Woo savours one final taste of that exquisite dessert on his table, to the lower levels of the hotel where patrons cross its unblemished marble floors, from the thumping club room where drunken assholes encumber their young mistresses shepherding them away from harm, to an exclusive members’ lounge where Sun Woo has to turf out a trio of petty gangsters, it is all about display, discovery, and absolute assurance in oneself.

1. The Finale (Se7en)

Okay, unlike all of the above I don’t exactly own this on an album (because New Line Records won’t ever issue a full score) but this may be the only track on this shortlist which I still consider a masterpiece. Howard Shore has combined a range of techniques in the past to generate similar apocalyptic textures (see Philadelphia, The Silence of the Lambs, and Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers, The Fly, Videodrome, Scanners) but in Se7en, acoustic, percussive, electronic and ambient sounds are given a crucial emphasis (as well as marquee value), as if the very project of his original composition was to sour the film it supports. And I suppose this is the project of the score. In this world, we as the audience are as much the subject of mistrustful scepticism as the honourable characters we follow onscreen; just as the film throws game-show noise and screaming kids and other hostilities our way, so too does Shore’s industrial score, which though certainly more tonal and less overpowering in the film’s first half, nevertheless tugs us beneath the surface on several occasions in its second and we invariably claw hard for breath. Shore stretches conventional instruments thin and slows them down, he mixes pure electronic sounds with live sounds not recorded in a studio, and he articulates absolute unearthly despair once the film is sucked down into the abyss. It is nothing like, for instance, Bernard Hermann’s score for Taxi Driver (1976), the tumbling routine of which becomes one and the same with the paranoid psychopath himself, dragging and stifling his senses. Se7en frightens by touch, it overcomes everything including the sunlight to trouble and hazard the frame.

What’s most brilliant about “The Finale,” which arises reproachfully in the film when Somerset first looks in the box, is that for a moment the recording cracks the veneer of cinematic verisimilitude. Although it betrays very little of the technical process of orchestral recording itself, at times I can make sense of the acoustic space in which the recording seems to have been made. The reverberation is such that, when consumed independently of the dialogue and effects track (see the Special Edition D.V.D.), the element of human agency involved is magnified. This, for me, was an amazing cue when I first experienced it. We all hear reverb in recordings many times when watching film, but never has it chilled me, or elicited emotional involvement, never has it felt correspondingly appropriate to the drama. In this moment, the “vacant hall” acoustic literally restates for me an earlier theme which is heard just the one time on the track “Searching Doe’s Apartment,” a music cue which emphasises the serial killer’s religious background (what Amy Taubin called “a particularly American strain of apocalyptic Christianity”) by creating the appropriate connections to Catholic mass, to the recitation of prayer, to the presence in one giant space of the faithful. Those non-diegetic sounds of mass and prayer are there in “Searching Doe’s Apartment,” but they’re not there in “The Finale.” They merely echo due to this “accidental” element of human agency. That’s a connection which I wonder if many other people actually make, but it is one which really sells the existential doom and magnitude of “The Finale” for me.

After hearing something so unnerving in this, the most musically complex of cues throughout the entire picture, there is really no going back.

4 November, 2010

The Social Network, David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin, 2010

2010-10-26T18:40:00.038+01:00

You Don't Get to 500 Million Friends Without Making a Few Enemies ...

FILM THE SOCIAL NETWORK DIRECTOR DAVID FINCHER

It’s assumed that Facebook is so often at the heart of popular culture these days that a film about its inception should be as meaningful to an audience as the web itself as a site of literature, politics, art, etc. Those who recall the work and play excitements of Zodiac—the free labour of Robert Graysmith, the uncertainty in his colleagues’ responses, the sheer information-sharing spirit of it—may feel a slight regression here. What compelled me about that film was the director’s use of the medium—the scope of Zodiac was perfectly suited to Fincher’s enthusiasm for illuminating the historical record with a Pakulaian eye. His interest seems to have been primarily in documentation, in the collation and synopsising of materials, people, testimony, imagery and theory, in the clashing of analytical methods and the furnishing of documentary evidence to assist a judgement (and not necessarily to arrive at one). The Director’s Cut D.V.D. edition, which became a household favourite in these intervening years, was impressive even further, if maybe still far (at least, so the documentary supplements suggest) from meticulously realised—worthy of its 158 minutes in many respects, it established a sense of distance, practice and purpose that, three years on, is more than familiar to us now as we watch The Social Network . . . and I confess to not liking Fincher's latest anywhere near as much. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's sense that the inception story of Facebook should be worked through narratively as a series of male-dominated crises isn't the worst crime perpetrated by a writer this year, but among those most deeply felt by some in its audience (and I totally count myself in this) who are already primed for something a little less absolute. The film makes these concessions intentionally, so of this much we should at least be aware. But, writing issues aside, The Social Network is one of the most engaging films to be produced under the Hollywood system, via Michael De Luca, via Scott Rudin, via Columbia and Kevin Spacey’s Trigger Street, for many years.

The film stirs a fuss over two politically irrelevant but not culturally uninteresting civil lawsuits: in the first instance, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Chief Executive, defends an ownership dispute which is filed on behalf of the Winklevoss twins (Tyler and Cameron) and Divya Narendra; in the second, breach of contract, partnership and fiduciary duty claims are brought against Zuckerberg by Eduardo Saverin: best friend, company co-founder and principal investor. The film turns to both pretty sharply after a gripping introductory segment which expands from Zuckerberg’s dorm, Kirkland House, to cover a party at the Phoenix Club and the entire nine House system of Harvard College. In this sequence Zuckerberg, dejected when his girlfriend unceremoniously dumps him at a Boston bar in the Fall of 2003, naturally attempts to validate his existence by bouncing back: first by venting his anger online, secondly by not-so-naturally scratching up a viral website which takes proverbial pot-shots at Harvard’s women and crashes the college web servers with 450 uniques. For crossing this and several other boundaries of privacy, copyright and community security in one go, Zuckerberg is reprimanded by the Ad Board, just enough to bolster a public profile that earns the respect of three Harvard students (the Harvard Connection team of Narendra and the Winklevosses) who are in the market for either a prodigy, or a programmer, or both. Accepting their pitch for an online community site, Zuckerberg agrees to help (which may or may not entail creating their code), ditches that idea, rents a server, expands the original programming and algorithms which he devised to run his Facemash viral, ditches the Harvard Connection, single-handedly codes a centralised community site for Harvarders, registers the name with his web provider, and launches the site in its original incarnation as TheFacebook.com in the first week of February 2004—his investor Eduardo in tow. The arrival further down the line of Sean Parker, the here thoroughly carnivorous co-founder of Napster to whom the film eventually gravitates in the cheery milieu of Palo Alto, offers Zuckerberg a glimmer of what it is that he should aim for—the chance to build in the Valley a company with the power to enhance connectivity and revolutionise the popularity of the internet on a global scale.

As the subject of Jesse Eisenberg’s astonishing portraiture, Zuckerberg emerges here in both great and ghastly shape: a brilliant ambition, a marvel at computer-science, an astonishing directness and clarity in his thinking and vision, yet he is simultaneously an impressionable blackguard, a vindictive sociopath, a fierce opportunist. Of Sorkin’s fictionalisation I think we’re all by now well on guard, but in the care of Eisenberg the character’s dimensions are significantly increased. The introductory scene, for instance, with Zuckerberg’s then current girlfriend, the fictional Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), is perfection; Sorkin’s dialogue—magnificent here and thoroughly, endlessly consumable—presumes a character so agitated, inexperienced and conflicted about women, about one woman maybe, that he is constantly swooping and diving to unpick Erica’s sentences and determine precisely their meaning; for his part, Eisenberg matches the theme with such delicacy and slow-burn irritation that I find it is impossible to keep him at a distance—the crisis of confidence that he projects and the sense at hand that self-loathing is all the while gradually bleeding into his open wounds and insecurities combine to perfectly exemplify what is altogether inventive and inspiring and uneasy about The Social Network. As a scene, it has nothing perhaps of the gentle elegance of an exchange from Se7en (1995), or the meticulous balance and exactitude of a Panic Room (2002) natter; in this more studious period of Fincher, it is angled aslant: like Zodiac, it’s jittery, it’s stabbing in several directions, and it is inarguably worthwhile. On the other side of the casting spectrum, Justin Timberlake seems to thrive as the playboy with a certain vulnerability, and Andrew Garfield makes a likeable though helpless Eduardo, the obvious objection being that the latter doesn’t quite pull off the budding businessman hell-bent on putting his specialist knowledge (hence, the meteorology/oil distribution thing) and acumen to use, although his charm, resolve and eventual disquiet all feel precisely on-point. Mara, as already noted, is tip-top, likewise Armie Hammer, whose marvellous interplay with his imaginary self and body-double (Josh Pence) provide the Winklevosses with a memorable, Addams Family flair. The film’s other women—Brenda Song as the group’s trophy plaything and Rashida Jones’ junior lawyer Marylin Delpy—are treated pretty unemphatically, which, this being a guys-falling-out movie, is no fair criticism, but their wild and cyclical (respectively) trajectories are magnified in this particular edit.

The film is enriched by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ synthetic score, but more than this the inclusion over the final credits of The Beatles’ original Baby You’re a Rich Man, which suspended the film on a floating high in my memory as I dashed off abruptly to catch the L.F.F. screening of Miike Takashi’s 13 Assassins (2010), inspired further for me a sense of kinship with the director or with the writer or whosoever shortlisted this, one of the band’s most enjoyable in my opinion, for approval.

Thus, to the issue of the writer-dramatist’s prerogative. In the hands of Fincher, Sorkin’s hateful neurotic and innocent charmer, the opportunistic slut and humiliated ex, the vainglorious ass and gaggle of villainous witches seem altogether less aggressive and excitable than when they appeared in previous incarnations (A Few Good Men, Malice, The American President and Charlie Wilson’s War, visceral works looking for visceral responses in their audience), yet the archetypal character trajectories both writer and director arrive at weakens their collective accomplishment. Could Sorkin find no way in which to foster a more critical examination of the company’s progress; of the skills, aptitude and cunning of even the story’s key sympathetic characters? The traditional argument is that general audiences neither desire nor expect to view a film with a high, almost documentary level of factual accuracy, or character complexity. This may be true for those who show little sign of any engagement with a film screened in a public venue beyond the mere enjoyment of an obvious line, but crucially they aren’t in the core demographic of the retail market where these film properties make their money. My argument is familiar but sincere: we still have the eye and the heart for mainstream works that overcome cinematic and story rhetoric, for works that do so in favour of less traditional representational forms, for character psychology, for social critique that has never before been so accurately depicted on the screen … for projects that do not need to so overtly revere the obviously compassionate and indict the mischievous token enemy. That Sorkin’s tale, Fincher’s film, is a conventional drama doesn’t bug me; that characterisation and factual accuracy suffer emphatically in Sorkin’s hands bloody well does. On occasion, I fell to wondering, as clearly as Lawrence Lessig evidently, if Aaron Sorkin knew how to write about the internet, or the route which Facebook took to an equitable future, or even the people all around us who are fully integrated into a broadband online environment. The film pays no more attention to Facebook usage than it does to preparing us all for the sudden manic turn of Brenda Song’s Christy Lee (and seriously: where the fuck did that come from??). Given the calibre of interview Sorkin's providing on the promotional run—for the internet he shows not the slightest respect—it seems he doesn’t give a shit. The suggestion, therefore, that the inventor of a social networking site with 500 million users plus is the loneliest soul on earth fulfils a screenwriter’s demand to make things classically theatrical.

So there's something of an artistic mismatch, which maddens anyone who admires Fincher's approach to filmmaking as highly as I. The dominant register remains Fincher's own, his table-level eye documenting things coolly and without surreal invention, but the story, the arcs, and the meaning stare right out into the audience, as if artefacts on Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull.

Yet I like it, and I’m encouraged that I want to and will see it again shortly. What Sorkin’s Zuckerberg makes of Facebook in the final outcome is most clear in the film’s grim parting image. In the scene that frames it, Zuckerberg cuts a solitary figure, the key accidental billionaire of Ben Mezrich’s title left to tend to his affairs alone in a high-ceilinged, low lit and virtually soundless office space. There, he intermittently taps refresh on his laptop having sent a friend request out into the ether. It lasts only a minute (give or take), but it is like experiencing, again, perfection. In all this, there is the sense that he has found a way of communicating without harming those around him—the internet has given a home to Mark Zuckerberg.

24 October, 2010

Vinyan, Fabrice Du Welz, Some things are better left not found

2010-09-18T00:33:00.014+01:00

Some Things Are Better Left Not Found ...

FILM VINYAN DIRECTOR FABRICE DU WELZ

The intertextual nods to psychological thrillers, horrors and survival adventures in Vinyan, Fabrice du Welz’s second feature which charts the metaphorical retreat of a grieving couple into the jungle, serve as a reminder of his relative inexperience at making his point primarily through images. Specifically, the works of Hook (Lord of the Flies), Roeg (Don’t Look Now), Cronenberg (The Brood), Lynch (The Lost Highway), Coppola (Apocalypse Now) and of Uruguayan filmmaker Chicho Ibáñez Serrador (Death is Child’s Play) provide du Welz with more than he can chew, most in their own way jungle survivalist tales of a sort, some so painstakingly detailed and expertly crafted on a cinematographic level that the successful tend to operate outside language. The way in which Vinyan traces the division of its traumatised couple, the Belhmers, is a bit rotten, the outcome a pale but not uninvolving conception of fantasy in which emotional connection and intimacy is sacrificed for the power and force of mimicry. The cluttering of diegetic space, the muddying of dialogue on the soundtrack, the consuming threat posed by the communal world and the iconography of this world matters more. It’s disappointing, because in interview du Welz is a good guy, self-aware too (a rare thing, even rarer to hear that he’s learning from mistakes), the sometimes contradictory public responses to his first two films (this and Calvaire) enough to stir serious reflection on his part; he too displays an obvious affection for Thai society, and in this film’s early Phuket street scenes, fashionably composed in a tight frame and bumping shoulder to shoulder with hookers, vendors, traffickers and vagrants all, we glimpse sometimes the objects of his fascination. It’s a shame, then, that he denies repeating here the stylistic choices of others, most blatantly Coppola, when the less conventional film techniques he employs appear conceived for that very purpose. None of this undercuts importantly his themes, which are well worth exploring in detail and I’ll get to in a beat, but the cumulative impact of this repetition, with little or no variation in tone and light, weakens the quality, and ultimately the weight, of our interest.

At a fundraiser evening, footage of children in a Burmese jungle is played to aid workers Jeanne (Emmanuelle Béart) and Paul (Rufus Sewell), a grieving middle-class white couple who lost their preadolescent son, Joshua, to the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004. The blurry image of a boy, his back turned to camera, the colour of his shirt calling to mind for us the red-caped figure of Don’t Look Now but for Jeanne the distinctive brand of her son’s favourite football team, serves as an inducement to action. Although the quality of the magnified image is poor and the isolated figure an anonymous jumble of pixels, for Jeanne and Jeanne alone the video has some authority. I suspect that not even she is convinced finally of its credibility (the video attests to the existence of a boy, not her boy), but it is nonetheless her belief that Joshua (wherever he may be) needs her, a belief premised upon seeing this stranger in the video which in some sense does contain the soul of her missing son. She may or may not relinquish finally her belief in the material existence of Joshua, the mystery is to a point irrelevant, but what’s far more intriguing is her compulsion to inhabit, to enter into and thus occupy, presumably for the sake of occupying, the timeless physical space pictured in the video. With this in mind, her quest to track down the boy which structures the film feels like a ritual of initiation motivated by an immutable sense of personal, i.e., parental (and since it is of importance, maternal), duty.

Alternatively Paul, who sees what his wife sees, is just another supportive husband, sceptical from a rationalist’s perspective but always trying to give her what she wants, his conviction that in time Jeanne will accept the thanklessness of their impossible mission penetrating deeper into Burmese territory and turn back. It’s with Paul’s story that the film’s passing acquaintance with Roeg’s aforementioned begins to cement, the strictures which he has placed around such metaphysical concepts as the supernatural and the invisible start to loosen, and the connection between his desire and Jeanne’s own all but severed completely. As a vulnerable man, susceptible to the fraud of human traffickers and moreover voiceless in their company, we sense that Paul will reinforce somehow his position come the resolution—the tragedy which split the family so potent to effect some kind of transformation in his character—but unlike Jeanne, he seems to get by in reality suffering less torment, almost certainly owing to less responsibility. He’s not welcome in the fantasy, and for knowing this he is constantly ill at ease.

This is all good stuff from a theoretical perspective and it’s helpful that du Welz leaves any uncertainties we have as audiences hanging—but this isn't a sympathetic portrait, the essences of the mood and feeling I sense beyond du Welz's control. The sunlit beauty of Vinyan's final shot provides a fine example: it depicts Jeanne, now a giggling mom again, surrounded and tickled by ten, twenty, thirty worshipping children. Seen as a purging of guilt and sorrow it’s the moment at which Jeanne’s soul rises out of the torment and into the light, the infants guiding her away from Vinyan and towards peace. But I’m unconvinced. If Jeanne’s successful withdrawal into fantasy requires that she find salvation in the illusion, then the image of salvation which it finally produces is imperfect. For that reason, it’s difficult to believe in her salvation. Though consistent with our general understanding of fantasy (Jeanne’s reemergence as a madonna figure offers respite from the pain of her desire to see Joshua again), the provocative final image of the film feels far from redemptive or cathartic. Or even pleasant. Far better to begin from a point at which we can all agree that the mother gives up on herself, and then move on to further details. Thus her stay of execution, which is generous against anything afforded her husband, is precisely that, and less likely to be a spiritual reprieve or second birth. As to the question of whether or not she can mother successfully again, the film concludes on a harsher note. Mother no more, not even a bona fide surrogate, she becomes a material plaything, poked, prodded, fondled, pushed and pulled. I guess this is intended as it was damn well conceived, to be wholly innocent that is (if a little uncomfortable to witness), but it poses implicitly the question, “what becomes of Jeanne outside the fantasy?” The positive resolution that occurs within the metaphor obscures something more hopeless and psychologically troubled occurring outside it. Rather than embrace the supernatural nature of the culture and draw from its Buddhist code in the hope of achieving spiritual rejuvenation, she, I suspect, surrenders to its darker underbelly beyond the fantasy.

18 September, 2010

The Prisoner of Second Avenue, the Vaudeville Theatre, Jeff Goldblum, 2010

2010-09-10T22:15:00.006+01:00

From the Old Vic West End: Low is High, Medium is High ... Down and Out in Manhattan

EVENT THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE VENUE THE VAUDEVILLE THEATRE, OLD VIC WEST END

So the lesson of previous visits to the Old Vic seems to be that no one should be deterred by the pomposity of any theatre’s seating plan, or even worse by the prices. For those whose paramount concern is not for the ambience of the theatre or the many tricks of its architectural add-ons, but for the length of a stare or for the stillness in a moment the front row, or failing this any of the stalls behind, is the ideal place to be. Here, the brevity, virtue and detail of the performance survives untouched: the patience of the lonely man poised on the edge of his seat awaiting the lights, the dust plume that coughs up into the air, the softened voice changing pitch, the trembling weakness in the stance, the winking eye as curtain later descends. I was front row centre for The Prisoner of Second Avenue and the reward of seeing these moments has done away completely with any inclination to book anything again in the dress circle. The little that was not on view held absolutely no consequence. Beanbags, for instance, don’t interest me. It was, instead, the kind of seat where your date’s partially exposed foot is close to those spinning oranges, the ones the principal just scattered in your direction and sent thumping to the floor; where in one comic instance Jeff Goldblum’s brain-damaged stare into the middle distance where the TV sits reaches and connects fleetingly with yours (and you are invariably giggling like some mad drinker); it is the kind of seat where those projectile buttons that come whizzing off his shirt in a state of supreme vexation come whizzing by your head, and are recovered at the interval by an apologetic stagehand. No seat is more rewarding in the service of this Neil Simon production than the centre seat in the Vaudeville’s front row.

His play dates from 1971, before President Ford rebuffed New York City Mayor Abraham Beame’s appeals in 1975 for help in the city’s debt obligations, and after a nationwide strike by auto workers against General Motors and the massacre at Kent State of four students by young and inexperienced national guardsmen, both in 1970. Scripted, therefore, long after the elegantly framed social comedies of Come Blow Your Horn (1961), Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple (1965), Prisoner revels in anxiety and syntactical expression, its subject the burgeoning ‘70s economic downturn and the burgeoning of a sense of collective working class protest. In this sense, the satirical re-staging of Grant Wood’s pre-Depression era American Gothic in much of the Old Vic’s publicity bears some meaning.

As the now terminally redundant Mel Edison, a once dedicated advertising accounts executive in the service of his employer for 22 years, Jeff Goldblum is a pathetic and lively hero, his performance an enjoyable confection befitting of Simon’s broad characterisation. In great form, his idiosyncratic approach—less with the hands this time, far more with the eyes—owes perhaps a fair bit to the eccentric mannerisms of his Seth Brundle under the direction of David Cronenberg, and the actor has of course touched on similar social crises before, the John Landis film Into the Night (1985) for one. In that film, his Ed Okin abandons his unfaithful wife and drives around L.A. for hours, hoping this will have a therapeutic effect; in Prisoner, on the other hand, Mel never once loses that literal connection back to his wife. Domestic servitude and love are, for Edna, indissociable. Despite herself being part of a more egalitarian world wherein the professional sphere need not necessarily be male dominated, Edna is always supportive and always nurturing, a quality that actress Mercedes Ruehl presumably had to overlook in order to get at the meat. On occasion Simon addresses this, at one point joking that Mel’s reliance on Edna for care will one day extend into the bathroom, but in contrast less is made of her dependence on him, particularly when it comes down to the basics of personal attraction and fidelity.

All this and the desire to transcend their white-collar lives, the impact of economic decline and of crime, the unjust punishment subsequently brought down upon them both, the emotional breakdowns they suffer, the sudden appearance of three equally nuts sisters, the implacable brother who scoffs at any desire to improve one’s lot, and the final return to a wintry scene of domestic harmony are characteristic of Simon, and in that sense Prisoner is as distanced from the current economic climate as Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) or Whatever Works (2009) are to the heyday of his stand-up. With Prisoner, he creates a specifically American idealisation with a socially therapeutic edge, his feed lines are often so indelicate you’d think this was a Chuck Lorre comedy, plus the trajectory of his narrative, from a metaphoric crucifixion to resurrection, is never once in question. These aren’t notes of dissent necessarily: just as we grow to accept a crude setting or an ill-placed stagelight we can all enjoy a Simon play withstanding the happy ending; they are, nonetheless, points to which you must invariably turn when considering the relevance of a New York City play, set and originally staged in the early 1970s, to a twenty-first century London in the economic downturn. Written for The New York Times, Patrick Healy’s piece, “Second Avenue Hits Home on West End” (from July 30), for some reason downsizes this point. It is not Simon’s play and themes that are of relevance, it is the wit and skill of the performer. To my relief, the principals were brilliantly suited to their roles, he dowdy and unfashionable, Ruehl impetuous and outrageous, the pair in the sharpest form from the very start.

4 September, 2010

Film4 FrightFest 2010 Video Nasties Panel

2010-09-02T11:36:00.025+01:00

Whooping It Up At FrightFest ... And On The Need To Flog The B.B.F.C. For All Its Failures

EVENT VIDEO NASTIES: MORAL PANIC, CENSORSHIP AND VIDEOTAPE / PANEL DISCUSSION VENUE THE EMPIRE OF LEICESTER SQUARE

Trust us English to build up so much resentment over a piece of legislation that wasn’t enforceable. Jake West’s imperturbably neat Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape screened on Monday morning to an enthused FrightFest crowd, and was followed by a panel discussion featuring many of its contributors. The documentary addresses a captivating and downright ludicrous period in the history of film regulation in this country: the attempted expulsion from within its borders of every kind of video “nasty” deemed unsuitable, chiefly by moral activists and rightwing sections of the press, under the outdated Obscene Publications Act. Though the pacing is rarely quicker than that of television, West’s film is scrupulously ordered, its story very well told, and the arguments of its key collaborator Martin Barker acutely felt. It is also impossible to watch in that it has scant regard for the visual invention of its subject matter or worse still the visual appreciation of its audience. Mark Hartley’s account, for instance, of the commercial growth of Australian exploitation cinema, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), uses film footage and high impact motion graphics with the latter bumping, bleeding, splashing and folding into the former—the whole thing is about as cinematically subtle as the subjects it devours, but it is at least brave and bold with it, familiarising us with striking images of the era and animating the one-dimensional characters, objects and dialogue bubbles that appear in their advertising. The best Video Nasties can do, evidently lacking the budget for rotoscope artists and 3D animators, is to drape newspaper clippings in the empty portion of frame and stack together, to the dim accompaniment of The Damned no less, brief clips from the 72 films included on the D.P.P. list. It is a motley thing, redeemed by the penetrating insight of an expert who has already covered this matter elsewhere, and with better contributors.

The Video Nasties panel discussion—which involved West, Barker, producer Marc Morris, Tobe Hooper and Allan Bryce—tested, appropriately enough, the current mood at FrightFest. The decision by the B.B.F.C. to recommend 49 cuts to Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film, which it says would approximate three minutes 48 seconds of footage, has obviously angered fans here. Many in the FrightFest audience who openly derided the B.B.F.C. for its assessment of the film opposed the passing of the Video Recordings Act originally in 1984, thus, they know something of the potential idiocy of mostly conservative politicians (including the newest clones of Graham Bright) and talking heads—a key note to which the Video Nasties film turns ultimately. This sentiment carried through into the panel discussion, where the B.B.F.C. was roundly stomped. The solidarity this inspired in the auditorium, particularly among the most vocal fans who knew that much admired filmmakers like Neil Marshall and commentator Kim Newman were in their vicinity, all felt a bit sorry, the cheering and applause an expression of allegiance without real foundation. The session might just as well have ended on director Jake West’s note that the prime purpose of these FrightFest audiences is to back the principle, supported by the casualties of the Video Recordings Act, that adults have the fundamental right to pick and choose their entertainment. Again, this drew applause from the crowd, and while the sincerity of their reaction cannot be doubted, I question the herd mentality that strings them along.

It was fashionable over the course of FrightFest to condemn the B.B.F.C. on the specific issue of A Serbian Film, which cannot play in Westminster City Council unless cuts are made, but not, however, its report for the I Spit on Your Grave remake, which required 17 cuts, all of which were duly made by Anchor Bay Entertainment. To which the response must be, why this distinction? According to its August 26 report, the B.B.F.C.’s proposal for compulsory edits to A Serbian Film were necessarily intrusive, and as such the 49 proposals clashed with a number of formal strategies (interrupted time schemes, the unreliable protagonist) that deliberately complicate the narrative; the cuts applied to specific images in I Spit on Your Grave, by contrast, resulted in less narrative or thematic disruption due to its more forgiving structure and the higher level of narrative redundancy. This fired the perception that the B.B.F.C. were responsible, however indirectly, for withholding from the public again a film of quality, a film equally if not more interested in the politics of ideology and narrative complexity than with generic provocation. FrightFest, therefore, pulled Spasojevic’s film to honour the festival’s “global integrity” and the “director’s [original] intention,” while I Spit on Your Grave, a far bigger picture with an established pedigree (in the form of a classic predecessor), played to a substantial audience on Saturday night—to which I’m inclined to argue that few here I’m sure would protest on the key matter of principle if A Serbian Film had been eligible to play in its B.B.F.C.-certified format. It would still have drawn enthused festivalgoers, just without quite so much rowdy bullshit.

It would be wise, therefore, to have a sense of the thing that one is rallying for before decrying this a return to the dipshit madnesses of the eighties. Today, the B.B.F.C. provides, as wittertainment fans know all too well, what it terms “extended classification information” for every film it examines. The E.C.I. text for I Spit on Your Grave is available freely online, together with the press release qualifying its proposals for A Serbian Film. It is, therefore, fairly transparent about its findings ... and yet it relies on public consultation largely to refine its guidelines and as a film and videogames regulator it operates from the starting position that the representations of a film or videogame have direct, predictable effects on us as consumers. I’m reminded again of West’s concluding note about the principle that as adult consumers we should be free to choose our own entertainment. The final word of the session went to Martin Barker who impressed upon his audience the value of producing intelligent film criticism for the internet, his point that our responses, if serious and evaluative about film, should serve to counter the earliest stages of reactionary public opinion in the event of a future video nasties scare. This makes far more sense to me, for being more constructive and persuasive than venting resentment in an enclosed, comfortable environment.

2 September, 2010

Film4 FrightFest 2010 Tobe Hooper Retrospective

2010-08-29T12:28:00.031+01:00

Welcome Step Up For Still Imperfect FrightFest

EVENT TOBE HOOPER RETROSPECTIVE VENUE THE EMPIRE OF LEICESTER SQUARE

To boost the profile of the 2010 FrightFest and to keep sweet the major online and high street retailers, as well as the Phoenix A.C., Total Film magazine and crucially headliner Film4 on whose sponsorship deals the festival so depends, the organising committee for the U.K.’s dominant fantasy/horror film tribute have secured several U.K. premieres ahead of this Autumn’s L.F.F., and invited a handful of directors, some populist and inventive, some mediocre and witless, to make a contribution. This year, the major star to excite anticipation across the P.R. departments of all its investors is Eli Roth. I can’t think why. I guess it’s for no better reason than the director of shit like Hostel has spent so much time with Quentin Tarantino that he’ll surely justify any booking fee with racy enough industry gossip and a gaggle of celebrity friends. The Last Exorcism, which he’s publicising in his capacity as star producer, rounds out the festival on Monday evening and is bound to gratify sponsors, punters, organisers all. Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, on the other hand, sounds far more deserving of its premiere. A historical account of the so-called “Video Nasties” fuss which descended on the country in the eighties, the documentary promises a comprehensive overview of film censorship and classification at a time when the B.B.F.C., under the direction of James Ferman, struggled with the implications of home-video exhibition, as well as new criteria for assessing the nature of cinematic violence. The premiere also gives occasion for an as yet undisclosed celebrity panel discussion immediately afterwards.

Without some rehearsal, though, these onstage events can reflect poorly on the subjects they’re intended to receive. Friday afternoon’s Total Icon attraction, which welcomed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) director Tobe Hooper for a retrospective of his work in the enormous space of the Empire 1 auditorium, should have been compelling but was a bit drab. There were some shortcomings for which the interviewer, Total Film journalist Jamie Graham, cannot be blamed: I generously include here the onstage seating and lighting arrangements, the muddling of which meant Hooper’s face was perpetually in Graham’s shadow (come on, sort that out); and the positioning around the stage of other Film4 and Total Film people, synopsising and videotaping for their online channels, must have riled those unfortunate to be seated, and thus not compensated, directly behind. However, other weak points in Graham’s control undoubtedly diminished the experience. Less inquisitorial interviewers get away with their style because, more often than not, they’re being harried for time (for the opposite approach, see comedian Joe Cornish’s brilliant Q&A with Edgar Wright, the main event two weeks ago at the B.F.I.), in which circumstances the quality of interview is largely set by the interviewee (and based on their appearances in London over the last two years, Danny Boyle and Terry Gilliam, both funny and extrovert, are great at steering interview). Hooper, however, is an introspective man: serious and contemplative on the stage, cheery and interested when one-to-one with fans, if evasive when questioned he is unlikely to expand an issue (and why would he?) unless an interviewer is ready to press or repeat. If Graham understands this, he is braver than I think. His stiff questioning reflected the tone of the magazine he co-edits, which has never done much to help its readership understand the cinematic works that so inspire either its staff or its commercial alliances with D.V.D. retailers. Far better would it have been to shake up this antiquated routine, thematise the questioning in line with the two Hooper works in exhibition (The Texas Chain Saw, and his 1969 debut, Eggshells), and throw the rest out to the FrightFest audience who are far more adept at cross-referencing Poltergeist (1982) with Invaders From Mars (1986) and Death Trap (1977). In such a case as this, those who attend the more upmarket In Conversation events at the B.F.I. Southbank must bear in mind the FrightFest’s humble origins as a celebratory knees-up in the Prince Charles ten years ago, a vital qualification, still relevant today, which does little for the Head of Film4 Julia Wrigley’s claim that while “some cultural commentators may look down on horror,” and hence by extension this festival, they’re fools for doing so.

Those who left the room early, however, diverted by the need to claim a spot in the autograph queue (and damnit, I envy all who now own a signed Texas Chain Saw poster), missed a treat. The interview may have been short and routine, but the five minute Q&A afterward elicited some really fun responses: from Hooper’s tactful assessment of Eli Roth’s career to date (more a delicate sidestepping) to his high praise for Guillermo del Toro’s, from his fond memory of working with British icon James Mason on the Stephen King miniseries ‘Salem’s Lot (1979) to the friendly gibe he made at compatriot Gunnar Hansen for his similarly congenial historical embellishments. Spirited, as well as candid, we glimpsed in this brief final session a clever and important director, the once ambitious filmmaker responsible for one of the most gruelling productions in North American movie history, whose distinctive Texan growl so familiar from commentary was like some kind of music to many ears, mine included.

29 August, 2010

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Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2010)

2010-08-02T12:37:00.008+01:00

Your Mind is the Scene of the Crime

FILM INCEPTION DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

As is often the case with the works of Christopher Nolan, it is undoubtedly the greatest help to ignore opinion before seeking out his latest in exhibition.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dominic Cobb, a specialist thief known as an “extractor” who can infiltrate a person’s mind through their dream in order to poach information, or more surreptitiously influence thoughts and individual actions. We spend time with Cobb and his trainee dreamscape architect Ariadne (Ellen Page), who labours to create and monitor the levels of an artificial world into which a team of extractors position their subjects for the routine purposes of extraction. For this endeavour to work, dreamscapes are designed with a fixed architecture which neutralises the fantasy and reflects society’s regulated banality. In order to put dreamers at ease, the dream worlds must give opportunity for thorough exploration, the use of an elevator, a controlled descent down a cliff face even, but architects are discouraged from creating boundless cities of light or mendacious sculptures of unblemished beauty. They are unspectacular things of artifice constructed expressly for the purpose of shared dreaming. Ariadne’s world is used, however, not for the purposes of extraction but for “inception,” an unlawful action which forces the subject to accept within the dream an idea it may have previously rejected on grounds of good conscience or reason. Inception, therefore, is the act of corrupting individual freedom, a powerful variation on the process of extraction and one that is wholly alien to many of the players at work in Cobb’s team (the petulant Ariadne included, though not of course Cobb himself).

Compared with an existential view of the dream (which is very nearly the sole preserve of David Lynch, whose The Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) particularly observe human behaviour in relation chiefly to the agonies of desire, and they do so admirably), Nolan’s is a shallow and unsatisfactory perspective, on the face of it a flippant homage to the mass-produced dream fantasies circulated by Hollywood for which he has been systematically criticised around the internet, and maybe to a point rightly so. But there is a significant caveat which puts pay to such arguments. Nolan’s fantasy has a logical structure, each dream a beginning and end point, there is some fitting coherence to all of this, not for the sake of commercial spectacle, not as a means to trump the idiosyncratic narratives of Lynch, but to give credence to our protagonist’s contention that it is possible to train the self to remain lucid throughout a dream. In Inception, the trained extractor can sustain a clear sense of perspective within any number of dreams, on condition that the dreamscape is supported by an orderly and regulated infrastructure. Our own sense of spatial orientation thus remains consistently fixed, the mise-en-scène bland, the editing concise and never disjointed: everything about this film it would appear conforms to the classical Hollywood style but such is the point and such is the intention of the regulated dream.

The spine of the film reminds us of Kris Kelvin’s attempts to fight off constructions of his own imagining in Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal and brilliant Solaris (1972), constructions which position him as a desiring subject in mourning for the loss of his wife but most profoundly for his family home back on Earth. Following a string of traumatic fantastical incidents which become psychologically unbearable, Kelvin succumbs to the illusory temptations laid out before him on the planet Solaris, a micro-world composed of those memory fragments which weigh most heavily on his conscience. Inception isn’t quite so aesthetically pleasing or consummately well organised, nor is Cobb’s fate a carbon copy of Kelvin’s, but like Solaris our attention is directed to the conscience of our protagonist who must wrestle with the anxiety produced by the suicide of his wife if he is to avoid slipping further towards the mystical void. One interesting (for being so damaging) consequence of extraction, or indeed any activity performed by the lucid dreamer for that matter, is that the trained extractor who spends years performing these kind of duties can carve into his world a space for holding memory fragments which go far beyond sentimental value. This is both a reassuring and haunting notion, perhaps the most truthful and well related in this ludicrous film. Cobb stores memory fragments of his late wife, Mal (played by Marion Cotillard) and their two infant children in a corner of dream space of his own design. Critically, it is not the fantasy of the loved one which Cobb spends his time with here (in this case Mal), it is rather an anthology of depthless memories and captured shared experiences which have lost their quality and purpose with repetition; his sense of the essential one-dimensionality of the memory now predominant over the three-dimensional complexity of the person. However, for breaking these memory fragments down into conventional fantasies and flattening them out in cinematic shortform, Nolan has again drawn reasonable criticism. The aesthetic perfection of the memory perhaps deserves our instant dismissal—for if anything attests to humanity’s clear imperfections it is our inability to recall in the faces of our lost loved ones the detailed beauty, character and mannerisms which so originally enchanted us. Our memories degrade (particularly as we inherit others), likewise the visions of those we desire most desperately. However, Inception gets it right by intentionally getting it wrong, or to put it differently Nolan has it both ways. False step though it may be, Nolan is nonetheless pointing to the role that unconscious desire plays in the rendering of desired objects in dreamscapes. If the appearance, disappearance or reappearance of those we desire within the dream is only of concern to our conscious self once we have been returned from the dream, it follows that within the dream our unconscious self is convinced of their presence by our compulsion to encounter the memory again. Desire within the dream confirms (unreliably) that our encounter with memory is perfectly credible, is perfectly real. Thus, desire, even within the world of Inception, has the power to corrupt the trained extractor. Why does the ordinarily lucid Cobb permit his conscious self to be duped by each and every appearance of Mal? Because he desires it, he still craves it so, and this part of the unconscious the trained extractor cannot temper.

Of the other extractors helping Cobb we know next to nothing. Almost without exception, the five are there to be admired, not really understood. Ken Watanabe’s Saito and Dileep Rao’s Yusuf are dependable sorts in Mission: Impossible-like conditions but the intentions of the former are at best opaque and we barely register the presence of the latter. Tom Hardy is winning plaudits for his naturalistic performance style, and not unreasonably, but he is an acquired taste and his character Eames another indispensable smartarse of some pedigree. Non-action slumps occur regularly here and inspire handsome conversation of a sort that shames most of us, as the expository sequences between Page’s clever clogs and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur attests most clearly. Our involvement with these invisible participants rarely moves us much beyond indifference, but what matters is their relation in geometric terms to others, they are allocated positions within the architecture so that mini-crises may be constructed around them. My acceptance and understanding of this I owe pointedly to the film’s definitions of dreaming: the film constantly reminds us of our ignorance about the fantasy, try though we may to provide any form of dream with a narrative set-up the power of the fantasy clouds our efforts. We remain none the wiser when the dream has returned us. Why, then, should it bother us if characterisation echoes this sentiment, particularly if the whole film is a comment on the depths to which Cobb has fallen. We should therefore take into account the likely possibility of his inception team being conventional emblems of his fantasy only, totemic guardians of barely three-dimensions with one clear goal in mind, to anchor Cobb within the fantasy in more ways than one.

It is at first glance then an unremarkable fiction, the gripping fantasmatic scenario at its core a waste, and were it not for the film’s origami unicorn moment it may sit a little less comfortably in the popular consciousness; it is on further inspection sexless and soulless, and the more I dwell on this the more the absence of the former bothers me. However, I like the thought of an Inception that behaves like a blockbuster, if only the thought. Its dim setpieces unfurl with evidence of much padding, it essays with an unearned sorrow the grim afterward of a relationship torn asunder, it too undercuts (and simultaneously inspires) itself with a fashionably tricksy volte-face that doubles as a nippy visual gag, and yet the thing is riddled ostensibly with unblockbustery ambiguities. In this, the film is so tightly constructed that structural or temporal inconsistencies provide opportunities to question later their precise meaning in relation to the final outcome. When, for example, do you pin down the moment at which Cobb enters the dream world seeking respite from the guilt that plagues him? Between Saito, Ariadne and Michael Caine’s enigmatic Miles, how many are themselves guilty of inception? I like the thought of this all more than the experience of bearing actual witness to it. If truth be told, Inception is superfluous to the act of meeting with one’s peers to lock horns on any number of issues to do with it that energise, define us and ultimately bring us together in argument. This is not the purpose of cinema or art, for that I refer anyone to Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Obayashi’s House, Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Scott’s Blade Runner, the list can run into twenty, forty films without a problem. Popular cinema is unfortunately no great leveller but it can inspire great water-cooler moments, the success of last summer’s Paranormal Activity being one, the connoisseurship Inception inspires being another. I am glad that we have a film of Inception’s thematic breadth in cinemas, its presence mocks industrial noise like Avatar (overweight bollocks that it is), and in looking back to Resnais, Kubrick, Jackson and the Wachowskis I hope it looks forward to finer blockbusters also, but with this much in mind, if I see Inception listed on some fool’s Best Movies of 2010-20 vlog on their YouTube channel in years to come I will box their fucking ears.

2 August, 2010

Pictures in the Rain: A Snake of June

2010-07-18T13:23:00.007+01:00

Pictures in the Rain

FILM A SNAKE OF JUNE DIRECTOR TSUKAMOTO SHINYA

Tsukamoto Shinya’s tantalising, photographic tale charting a woman’s sexual reawakening in a modern Japanese city carries with it one of the most irritating and at times infuriating aesthetics cultivated outside of the contemporary avant-garde. Shot in CCTV blue, with a fevered editing style, A Snake of June benefits hugely from Tsukamoto’s thematic preoccupations as both an observer of the human figure and impressionistic storyteller, but less so from his lofty intentions as a cinematographer or lover of montage. When characters find themselves alone, his camera wanders skyward, searching for some inelegant truth in the shadowy projection of rainfall cast on the wall behind and finding little or nothing of the sort. The film, of course, stands up far better than this line of criticism suggests, for even in its crudest hallucinatory moments a powerful emotional balance is struck, such that one cannot overlook the beauty, virtue, or achievements of its scenes. In this, A Snake of June achieves what its predecessors Tetsuo (1989), Tokyo Fist (1995) and Sôseiji (aka, Gemini, 1999) largely cannot. An almost total absence of the biomechanical tricks and mannerisms of those films is one of several indications that Tsukamoto is comfortable with his discovery here, that he is content or confident enough in the story’s intrinsic value to merely observe how one relationship rebuilds another. At its core, A Snake of June is an accumulation of increasingly daring, excited experiences which, taken together, offers a glimpse of the importance and power of seduction to a woman confined by the mechanical orthodoxy of a marriage lacking concord, passion and love. Little of this is in any way original (think of Body Heat, think of The Postman Always Rings Twice) but the effect nonetheless is spellbinding, and come the final scene surprisingly moving.

Before this, however, Tsukamoto devotes a lengthy scene to the climax of this revolutionary movement in our protagonist Rinko’s life, her erotic imagination no longer teased and stimulated by the intervention of an other but instead excited by and for only itself. Having braved and survived the earlier demands of her blackmailer, a photographer who is shown in the opening scene literally bringing off a woman with his camera, Rinko (played by Kurosawa Asuka) now leads blackmailer (Iguchi, a role for Tsukamoto), husband (Shigehiko, taken by Kohtari Yuji), and it goes without saying film and audience into a desolate back alley where the thick summer rain churns the ground to a crescendo. There she succumbs amid all this noise and provocation, stimulated by the remote vibrator between her legs and brought to exhaustion by her own ascendancy, desire and domination. It is the moment of cruel freedom afforded female virginal subjects in classical works of art, the brief respite before fate’s evil intervention.

18 July, 2010

Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, USA,UK, 2005)

2010-07-18T07:18:00.002+01:00

The Path to Justice Begins ...

FILM BATMAN BEGINS DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

In June 2005, Warner Bros. threw its hat into the comicbook ring with a very different breed of superhero. Of precisely the same generation as Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000), Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) and Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), Batman Begins was as important strategically as it was ultimately culturally, not least because it paved the way for the studio’s much anticipated Superman reboot the forthcoming summer, a film which stood well apart from Batman intellectually, if only in the sense that it socialised the hero as a despondent dad who pined for the sexual attention of his once biggest fan. While Raimi’s Spider-Man (arguably a precedent-setter for the new millennium) celebrated the vintage and colour of the genre, Batman was and is a deeply modernist tale tracing the formative years of its tormented idol, a bleak comicbook film at one with disillusionment and cheap sentimentality.

The script expends the bulk of its narrative originality and bite—not to mention sympathy for its central hero—in the long first act, a movement embellished with familial and romantic intimacy, personal loss and latent suffering, so much of it in fact that one nearly loses respect altogether for the far more palatable business of the almost-superhuman triumphing over mere mortals. It’s hard to feign interest in this revolutionary supply of dark, psychologically rich material, all of it illustrated with a whimpering child and his corny father, and the result is often overbearingly saccharine. Historically, Batman has always indulged the pre-adolescent’s nightmare of suffering terrible, instantaneous change, here thrust upon the child Bruce Wayne via the trauma of Wayne Senior’s murder but more to the point the shortcomings of Gotham City’s judicial system and its inept attempts to satisfactorily reprimand the killer. As if the threat of public intimidation and corrupt courthouses were not trite enough, the sitcom-style vignettes which complement these story developments are, with few exceptions, crass and laboured, no selfreflexive comment on the mawkish sentimentality with which patriarchal values and preoedipal concerns are handled in modern commercial cinema intended.

Having established why the principles of individualism and freedom are indissociable from the personal backstory of Wayne, the film sinks deeper into conservative but altogether rewarding territory as Christian Bale’s now adult billionaire, on sabbatical in the Far East, endeavours to better comprehend the criminal mind and in the process grudgingly come to terms with his own diminution of power. Here, the film and its strangely accented (insofar as the emphasis is so clearly on Bale the icon as male militarist as opposed to friendly superhero) marketing campaign coalesce. In fact, the male ascendancy and initiation ritual, largely dramatised here for the most part in China where Wayne, in the company of a band of monastic warriors, perfects the art of unarmed combat, is clearly on a par with the original Star Wars series and particularly its central rites of passage conceit. Wayne’s ritual of initiation into the League of Shadows and final confrontation with its puppet leader is engrossing, not least because it showcases a peculiar blend of Newsies-like rebelliousness and authoritarianism by way of American Psycho. However, like Mary Harron’s clunky adaptation, a fitting if casual comparison, director Nolan’s reluctance to stray from the material world of the comicbook fantasy seems to support the suspicion that both filmmakers maintain a confounding lack of confidence in Bale’s abilities under should we say more reflective circumstances. Why do these films afford him only the single scene to engage in some form of broadly theatrical activity? Why is the bulk of Wayne’s suffering instead given over to child actor Gus Lewis in a volley of earnest flashbacks which lack depth and punch and moreover never cease? In the intervening years, proud genre films like Public Enemies (2009), The Dark Knight (2008), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), The Prestige (2006), Rescue Dawn (2006) and The New World (2005), together with brainless dross like Terminator Salvation (2009) and Harsh Times (2005), have served only to consolidate Bale’s current position as an endearing and honest actor, and while his Herzog and Mangold works deserve a far better response than anything I have space for here, the remainder carry worthy performances and little more.

Still, Batman makes its purposes clear when the first of a range of great and mediocre actors arrives to flesh out the stalwart supporting cast. Having appeared in 2005’s hopelessly muddled Kingdom of Heaven as something of a divinely sanctioned paternal figure in whose image lives Orlando Bloom’s Balian as the defender of Jerusalem, Liam Neeson surfaces once again as the surly-mannered tutor/paterfamilias, his contribution sullied this time only by much Gotham-based bloodletting in the finale and a succession of action setpieces that skew proceedings accordingly. Ken Watanabe, cast as another sword-wielding artist in Ed Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003) but perhaps more appropriately to type in prestige titles such as Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), is here apportioned strictly Hitchcockian duties as the primary MacGuffin in the amusingly baffling League of Shadows. Gary Oldman, surely the one inspired artist amidst all this plastic gloss, has a duty to perform his honourable serviceman-cum-Sergeant-cum-Lieutenant without flair. In this, his James Gordon does what only franchise regular Alfred Pennyworth could do in previous instalments, aligning Wayne with the communal social world and serving as a figure of goodness without artifice. It’s impossible to shake off one’s despair, however, at the sheer banality of the film’s token female character. Screenwriter David Goyer, it seems, composites Julia Roberts’ district attorney in Conspiracy Theory (1997) and Kim Basinger’s reporter from the original Batman (1989) to conjure for actress Katie Holmes the sexless Rachel Dawes, an assistant DA whose soppy backstory is indeed uncovered early here to elevate her death in The Dark Knight to melodramatic heights. It’s precisely the sort of role which, unfortunately, is disproportionate in scope to the quite remarkable media attention lavished upon the actress in those post-Access Hollywood/Paxil days. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, meanwhile, slot into place as amusing helpers, the merest hint of three-dimensional complexity in their roles subsumed by the insufferable persistence of yet more city-in-great-jeopardy business and their industrious attempts to problemsolve tricky dilemmas (for one, a fear-inducing hallucinogen is bound for Gotham where it is to be pumped into the water supply). Okay, Caine is cheery and provides good heart to this adolescent fantasy, but cinemagoers once repelled by Tim Burton’s peculiar little circus in Batman Returns (1992), or the deplorably pantomimic break from etiquette that typifies Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) should realise that very little has changed in spirit or even in execution. For one, Cillian Murphy’s demented Jonathon Crane, who for many offered a glimpse of what the franchise would produce under Nolan’s direction, strays irredeemably close to mimicry, his plainclothes persona matching the ostentation of Batman's pre-betrayal Jack Napier. The fate of his character suggests that the classical restoration of order will be given primacy over the complex development of any future accidental villains.

All of this invites a very simple question: does the modern blockbuster attract more high-end filmmaking talent than it deserves? In the current Hollywood system, among established filmmakers, blockbuster work is desired in an almost auteurist, entrepreneurial spirit, yet in blockbuster work itself a spirit of, to adapt a Camera Politica term, “massification” prevails. Though one adopts a style to make one’s work distinguishable from all others, in order for that work to reach anyone it must be first undone at the point of conception and consciously made again with a renewed sense of duty not to oneself but to others. We see this clearly in the mechanics of comicbook adaptations, but it is there too in endless genre films of the current mainstream. And if there is a flaw in this arrangement it is that ambitious filmmakers of Nolan’s stock, who when servicing a conglomerate power’s media divisions are capable of good design and give serious consideration to their works, sell the promise of their new designs but contractually withhold them from market. Some I know see in Batman Begins a revolution of the modern blockbuster but I see in its architecture merely a token remodelling, enjoyable yes, stirringly so, but in the absence of real conviction or cultural authority it is still playing by corporatist rules set down by companies. The spectre of more nineties-era buffoonery, for instance, never far from mind on a viewing of Batman Begins, surfaces again with a string of chronically uninvolving plot devices, each more testing of one’s patience than the last. The aforementioned setpiece depicting the contamination of Gotham’s water supply echoes 2005’s Sahara, not to mention the innumerable Bond prototypes it itself lampoons. Batman’s inevitable alliance with the GCPD’s Homicide Division, despite allowing for more interaction with Oldman’s cautious Gordon—a sceptical fellow until the ordinarily robust institutions of society are radically devalued in times of crisis—covers old ground already charted by Burton’s original. And likewise, the perfunctory batmobile chase sequence, whilst arguably justifiable inasmuch as it supports a humorous exchange between Wayne and Caine’s Alfred shortly thereafter, is another boring affair fit only for a viewership whose cinematic counterparts are those policemen, gormless and gobsmacked, who issue the standard double-take when prompted to do so. In addition, the visual representation of the city as a mechanistic organism outside one’s control is disappointing: the many interconnected train networks which tie into the Wayne Tower building recall similar elevated constructs in other adventures, the boundless, spiralling forms of Batman & Robin’s (1996) cityscape for instance as conceived by Barbara Ling, the skyscraper-madnesses even of the Coens’ The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), whilst Nathan Crowley’s design for the city’s lowest levels, exemplified in the slums of the Narrows, is perhaps happier in the context of Metropolis (1926) or even Blade Runner (1982). There have in recent years been better movie cityscapes. I, Robot’s (2004) inventive use of live action plates, digital horizon lines, set extensions and keyframe animation (executed jointly by Weta Digital and Digital Domain) makes up for any lapse in quality at a story level, against which the urban dystopia of Batman Begins can only really be measured as an incoherent muddle, a smoking warehouse facility flattered by pushy, itchy shots of panoramic CGI.

As I’ve said, there are stirring moments in it, along with moments of neat rapport—one firmly believes in Wayne’s adoption of his father’s former role and more so his training for privilege in martial arts. The score, drawn together by the same old faces (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard), is capable of the odd light touch, but is admirably rousing at the other extreme when evoking rebellion and malice and freedom in the avenging son. There is, then, enough here to applaud, but no more than there is to deplore. At the first screening I attended in the summer of 2005, a damn-near incomprehensible projection in IMAX format, the film excited enough fans to merit affectionate applause in its final scene. In that sense it is perhaps important and I don’t blame them. This is an improvement on the general idiocy of its predecessors, but if Nolan’s goal is to marry his franchise by some alchemy with the faux adolescent horrors of the Grand-Guignol he must first build up some conviction.

18 July, 2010

Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Conversation at the BFI 2010 2

2010-05-25T21:09:00.005+01:00

In Photographs

SUBJECT APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL IN CONVERSATION 25 MAY 2010

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Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Conversation at the BFI 2010 1

2010-05-25T21:08:00.006+01:00

In Photographs

SUBJECT APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL IN CONVERSATION 25 MAY 2010

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John Landis in Conversation at the BFI

2010-03-16T21:07:00.005Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT JOHN LANDIS VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT JOHN LANDIS IN CONVERSATION 16 MARCH 2010

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Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Alex Gibney, USA, 2008)

2009-12-12T17:43:00.003Z

Out With a Bang

FILM GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S THOMPSON DIRECTOR ALEX GIBNEY

Hunter S. Thompson’s hatred for Nixon was well known, but his dealings with and regard for Patrick Buchanan—staunch conservative, Nixon’s special consultant, and White House speechwriter in the late sixties and throughout all of the Watergate affair—were productive and far healthier. So much so that when Thompson approached him to write a piece on the future of American conservatism for Rolling Stone, citing his own “twisted sympathy” for Pat’s personal stance during Watergate (“if only because,” Thompson went on to say, “of what strikes me as [your] basic integrity, along with a stylistic brutality that I can appreciate”), Buchanan accepted, and replying in kind joked: “Tell your liberal friends we expect to be treated with all the deference and respect as outlined in the Geneva Conventions on the handling of prisoners of war.” Clearly the two enjoyed a great rapport with mutual trust.

In his final appearance in Alex Gibney's super documentary, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Buchanan is, alas, accepted and rejected as a “half crazed Davie Crockett” character (as Hunter once described him)—accepted, that is, by filmmaker, and rejected (on the same terms) by audiences who never get to see the man Hunter knew. But his scene is, for me, the defining moment in the film, for it exceeds its pertinence and applicability in every regard. Speaking highly of Hunter’s promise in a soundbite that seems (more than anything) to actually bemoan his egotism, Pat’s interview is interrupted by the roar of a motorcycle engine in the street outside, forcing the production crew and Pat to stop until its fade out on the soundtrack. Glancing over at Gibney, Pat laughs, “that’s fitting!,” a joke which gestures as much towards Hunter's time with the Hell's Angels as it does to his early years as the Outlaw biker of Big Sur. The shattered, indispensable moment recalls the best of Herzog: a world that cannot be tamed, unleashed in all of its exquisite mystery. A phantom of Hunter’s world, indeed Hunter as phantom, undoing the sanctity of modern, American conservatism.

12 December, 2009

Paranormal Activity (a girl, her boyfriend, their home, and a serious mistrust of cameras)

2009-12-06T14:24:00.020Z

A Serious Mistrust of Cameras

FILM PARANORMAL ACTIVITY DIRECTOR OREN PELI

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So, Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, still very much in the news right now for scaring the pants off transnational audiences the world over, is the “scariest movie of the year” and it’s no big surprise to learn that the digital camera has everything to do with its success. The film has been spooking, chilling and thrilling millions of us as we all share helplessly in its first-person POV: whether locked off in its familiar position at the foot of the tormented couple’s bed, or as a constituent part of the action itself, the first “eye” so to speak into the loft and the first through the blinds downstairs registering the chill of night. Via our complete immersion in the reality of the home video, we become linked (again) to one character, one subjectivity, and we are asked to feel the loss of that character finally when he and the camera is abandoned; when the film abandons us.

For those who don’t know, Paranormal was produced for $15,000 by Blumhouse Productions, it was sold for $300,000 to Paramount, who then marketed and distributed the movie domestically at an estimated cost of $10 million. It was well-reported that by its fifth weekend, the film had dispatched Lionsgate’s Saw VI at the box-office and grossed in the region of $62 million across 1,945 playdates. As a result, it’s gone on to accrue the status of a small cultural phenomenon, with many claiming that if you don't watch it in a crowded cinema then you shouldn't watch it at all. So, firstly, I declare I saw it late on a Saturday night in the heart of London’s Leicester Square, with a great audience that was clearly up for a lot of howling and derision. I want to note this from the outset because, unlike Sanchez and Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project, there’s very little confusion, agency or narrative jeopardy in Paranormal to trigger unease on the part of the viewer: I can imagine for instance that, when viewed in isolation, the experience of consuming Paranormal Activity at home or on a computer will be entirely banausic. That’s the first thing; the second thing is that the film builds to a final dramatic movement which it intends to play like a rallying crowd-pleaser but which is also, surprisingly, genuinely interesting on reflection. The graphic image of Katie lying in bed in broad daylight, for instance, nearly comatose under the influence of whatever force now commands her, eerily recalls the obscure black and white photograph glimpsed earlier of her torpid “double,” long since deceased—a photograph that is discovered incidentally by Katie’s boyfriend on a website that looks as old as the web itself. And though the scenes in which Katie rocks back and forth for hours at the bedside are largely played for giggles, the sight of her body vanishing unceremoniously in the open doorway and into the darkness of the stairwell invariably recalls the highly staged and downright brilliant photography of FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922).

There’s been some commentary in the press about what precisely it is that affected audiences are taking away with them after a screening. Mark Kermode, for instance, is these days regularly questioning the film’s efficacy as horror (very nearly from a position of non-partisanship), asking why some viewers are taking its apparent jouissance so close to heart. That isn’t to say that the film’s pleasures are necessarily orgasmic of course, at least not in the traditional literary sense of a thumping, exploding, attainable pleasure that leaves you drained, tingling and sweetly enervated; no, rather the film comes closer I think to forging a (possibly intense) connection between the self and the diegesis, which the fantasy then propels beyond boundary. In other words, the filmmakers are making you a participant and then scaring you, but the film is I think achieving something else entirely—something less to do with horror, then, and more to do with the comforting zone, the behavioural routine, of domestic familiarity.

It is true, admittedly, that horror (or “paranormal activity”) is the principal, saleable pleasure on offer here, particularly since we are aligned with characters who experience shocks, bangs and frights first-hand. Over the course of the film we’re presented not with the vision of a demon or an apparition, but the sensational affect of that demon. So, we hear its great big, clumping (one presumes) hooves entering the bedroom, we see the powdery trail left in its wake (apparently testament to its corporeality, albeit in another dimension seemingly), we witness both its brutal attack on Katie and, in a manner reminiscent of Sidney J. Furie’s bulky 1981 horror The Entity, its salacious attempts to defile her when at her most vulnerable. Anyone who reads the film as a straightforward horror tract, unproblematically supernatural at its core, will also see the creature’s influence clearly in Katie’s apparent “possession” at key intervals in the plot development, not least in the film’s rousing final moments when she finally gets to “kill” her boyfriend’s annoying camera (as my viewing companion remarked at the time, “it was worth the £10 just for that”).

However, for me, Paranormal Activity seems to be more in the mould of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a film in which the director’s roving eye ritually prowls the communal spaces of an American high school (hallways, canteen, library, football field), over and over again, until the institution feels properly “lived in,” perhaps as familiar as one’s own workplace. This same routine behaviour of the roving lens is evidenced in Paranormal, albeit less discreetly. If horror is the catalyst which finally surfaces here to move us beyond our self—in other words, if the “fantasy” breaks the boundary of self-control, permitting us to sample one of the possible delights of jouissance in the final reel—then importantly the warm domestic setting of the Katie and Micah household forges this connection in the first place. It is precisely this connection which I am arguing that affected audiences lament in the aftermath of viewing. I don’t think audiences are troubled by effects (neither aural nor visual), but rather by a sense of lack, and I think that, theoretically, what we lament “losing” is precisely this emotional connection which we forge with the domestic milieu, with the familiar. How many times, for instance, does the first-person camera, with which we are aligned, wander out into the hallway in order to see downstairs? Not surprisingly, the ritual leaves its mark on us, as participant-spectators. We glimpse the white teddybear at the end of the hall so often that it becomes imbued with personal history (the prize that Micah (the subjective “I”) won with Katie (“my girlfriend”) at the fair on a biting winter’s evening). And we see that big-screen TV so many times that its mystery, its attractive commodity glamour, inevitably fades like the formerly intoxicating appeal of an ex-lover. So we’re no longer simply transgressing our own spectatorial position of detachment (in which process we are aligned with the camera to mimic a POV), but we are beginning to “learn,” behaviourally, the lives of others, the rituals and routines of tangible characters as if we have lived in their place. In fact, there comes a point in the film when the camera (having been waved so many times around the kitchen and either deposited on a countertop or left in the living room watching from afar) becomes almost childlike in its voyeurism; we, too, mimic the POV, and so we begin to experience the house (or at least, the kitchen area) for a moment as the vulnerable child, tracing the contours of the kitchen units like a pranksterish sneak.

Importantly, then, the novelty “surface” value of spectatorial mobility is supplanted by the first-person experience, by the ceremony, and the propriety of domestic ritual. The POV, therefore, is no longer about action, or story “event” as evidenced in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), nor is it necessarily “about” the documented quasi-reality of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), nor the promise of interactivity and mobility offered by The Blair Witch and [Rec.] (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007). Forget all that. Paranormal Activity is about a number of things which can be grouped loosely under the category of lived experience, but at its heart it is a film about the home, about our personal attachment to our homes, and more crucially about our established customs in the home. That may seem like an obvious point to make, but it signifies nevertheless an interesting development in the aesthetic of handheld, “found footage” movies. A first-person POV film that chimes with its audience on account of its depiction of ritual behaviour, and custom, is I think finally, demonstrably, tapping Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious.

6 December, 2009

Park Chan Wook at the Barbican 2009

2009-11-05T21:10:00.005Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT PARK CHAN WOOK VENUE THE BARBICAN

EVENT PARK CHAN WOOK INTRODUCING THIRST THE DIRECTOR'S CUT,
LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL OPENING GALA 5 NOVEMBER 2009

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The London Korean Film Festival 2009

2009-11-03T19:19:00.045Z

Looking Back With the Korean Film Festival

EVENT LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2009 VENUE THE BARBICAN, BFI SOUTHBANK

My first cinematic encounter with a movie of the New Korean Wave in London came in the impoverished setting of the Covent Garden Odeon cinema a little over three years ago. This coincided with the then inaugural launch, or more accurately the BETA-testing period, of the official London Korean Film Festival 2006; it was very much a localised event, low-key but with enough ingenuity on the part of its ambitious programmers and artistic manager to capitalise on the success of Park Chan-wook’s third “vengeance” entry, the then titled, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (the film continued to do business for the Curzons well into 2007). Film4 was at the time about to unroll its “Brilliant Korea” season on television also, which shepherded us all, from the novice to the passionate evangelical, through the gates of the New Korean Cinema via the more populist works of Kong Su-chang (R-Point, 2004), Kang Je-gyu (Brotherhood; Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo, 2004), Kim Jee-woon (A Tale of Two Sisters; Janghwa Hongryeon, 2003), and, of course, Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, 2003; Lady Vengeance; Chinjeolhan geumpjassi, 2005).

My first, and only as it turned out, selection for the 2006 festival was Jang Jin’s Baksu-chiltae deonara (2005). I think it was advertised with the title Murder, Take One but screened with The Big Scene . Shortly after, I wrote a piece on the event in which I complained, but not in a caustic way, about what I saw as the general lack of support for the “Korea Film 06” enterprise (to retrieve the original brand name, since abandoned to the past). It had good maintenance marketing in the Evening Standard, it was launched in the Odeon where it stayed for the length of its run, and in addition the tickets were free in those days which, as any Londoner will tell you, goes down very well in the city (it is almost unheard of today, for instance). And yet, it appeared as if the festival was little more than a recapitulation of the 4-day movie event (sponsored by branches of the Korean communications corporation C.J.) housed at the Prince Charles and in Soho in conjunction with the 4th London Korean Festival. The project was a clever exercise in market orientation, and I’m sure that for the organisers this was precisely the purpose of Korea Film 06, but it disappointed me that seemingly so few moviegoers or enthusiasts were responding in number to their commercial plan (I had hoped, a viable one). Which leads me neatly to the crux of today’s post.

It pleases me considerably that the K.F.F. is now emboldened and inspirited. Held predominantly in the more intimate screening rooms of the Barbican Centre, the festival reaped a veritable whirlwind in the Autumn of 2008 (arguably the event’s banner year), when—aided, animated and abetted by the U.K. office of the wonderful Korean Cultural Centre (and no doubt buoyed by the triumph of entertaining Park Chan-wook himself in 2007 for the exhibition of his Vengeance follow-up, I’m a Cyborg But That’s Ok)—its organisers secured the high-profile guest appearances of Kim Jee-woon and Lee Byeong-heon (the latter, for those not in the know, is of a par with Brad Pitt circa-Seven Years in Tibet in terms of national celebrity, complete with questionable K-pop career). The programme also featured some immensely powerful, eminent works of contemporary Korean cinema from director Lee Chang-dong, including the slightly masochistic Secret Sunshine (Milyang, 2007), Peppermint Candy (Bakha satang, 1999), and Oasis (2002). In addition, the committee was sensibly aided by the input of resident lecturer, Julian Stringer.

Today safely entrenched in the Barbican Centre, with a retrospective or two lined up and running in parallel at the B.F.I. Southbank, the London K.F.F. has proceeded along perfectly acceptable lines. For 2009, it has extended the terms of its remit, engaging the kiddies with an Animation Day; extolling the virtues of arguably Korea’s most important filmmaker, Yu Hyun-mok, in a richly archival retrospective; showcasing an extended cut of Park Chan-wook’s latest, Thirst (Bakjwi, 2009), for the opening gala this coming Thursday; highlighting a handful of offbeat, so-called “independents” from Jang Kun-jae, Kim So-yong and Jeon Soo-il; and receiving relatively new talent in the form of star/director Yang Ik-june, whose heavily publicised debut feature, Breathless (Ddongpari, 2008), this year garnered much critical attention on the international festivals circuit. Stringer is on the committee again, and joined by Daniel Martin, who has presented in the past on the marketing tactics and cultural reception of contemporary Korean films in the U.K. As I’ve said before, there are a number of films I’ll be attending—in fact, the festival is to all intents and purposes already underway; I just had to go to last night’s screening of Bong Joon-ho’s brilliant Memories of Murder at the B.F.I., a real favourite of mine and a treat to catch finally on a cinema screen. It’s come a long way from its humble, four-day, twelve-film beginnings. Good on you, K.F.F.

3 November, 2009

She, A Chinese (Guo Xiaolu, UK/France/Germany, 2009)

2009-10-29T17:43:00.036Z

Proving Oneself Necessary in a Harsh World ...

FILM SHE, A CHINESE DIRECTOR GUO XIAOLU

It’s that time of year again when the London Film Festival winds down and we think forward to the provocative treats on offer at the forthcoming Korean Film Festival, held as usual this year at the Barbican Centre but crucially with a special Bong Joon-ho retrospective underway at the BFI Southbank. Among the highlights are a Director's Cut of Park Chan-wook's blockbuster, Thirst, which is set to be introduced by the director himself; Scandal Makers, the new film from Kang Hyung-chul about a celebrity radio show host who is hit by a "comic" paternity scandal; and a tantalising new film from Kim Ki-duk, titled Dream. In the meantime, I want to post briefly on last night’s film at the LFF, She, A Chinese, the first feature-length drama from prolific Chinese author and poet, Guo Xiaolu (key referent: “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers”).

The film plays in two parts (a smalltown life in rural China; a cosmopolitan one in London) and Guo presents her story in a very particular style, ordering events into a novella form and incorporating various whimsical intertitles that comment at one stage or another on her protagonist's predicament. The story concerns a Chinese peasant girl, Li Mei (Huang Lu), who lives in a village somewhere outside of the major city of Chongqing; there, she scrapes together an existence barely above the poverty line in which she performs menial tasks for her dismissive mother and oversees a local stall for pool-playing layabouts who ritually overlook her as a growing, desirable young woman. An apparently remote but anxious girl, Mei protests against her mother's undignified (but still honest) work by taking off with a petty gangster, but when she refuses to submit to him for sex she winds up in the arms of another admirer, a local truck driver, who unceremoniously rapes her. As a consequence, Mei begins to move opportunistically from one sexual encounter to another and over the course of the film arrives finally in London, where she suffers the same asphyxiating sense of isolation that undercut her spirit so painfully back home—except that here her one saving grace is her quite obvious exoticism; thus, we have a low-budget film in which the spectre of Orientalism is writ large, and its chief protagonist appears to take full advantage of the fact in the hope of settling her life.

Now, I have several problems with the film, but I also want to defend it. On the first matter: the issue of narrative. Interestingly enough, Guo has said in her director’s statement that “it is crucial to show the process of leaving, the inner journey she is going through, a person taking risks, discovering herself and at the same time paying a high price.” Which is fine, except that some of the crucial acts of “discovery” and the “risks” that Mei takes (which set in motion her flight from China) are never shown. Scenes in which Mei exchanges (hitman) Spikey’s money for foreign currency (for the first time), or the totally alien business of booking her first transcontinental plane ticket (even if it is part of a guided tour package), are altogether absent from the film; these are admittedly minor moments, but I still feel they’re intensely personal, and probably daunting for someone so immature: these are the experiences, after all, that helped to build our confidence as we ourselves ventured into the unknown, some of us on our own. Similarly, we never see Mei take Spikey’s money from the mattress (the act is inferred), yet this is possibly the riskiest transgression she will ever make in her adult life (she is, effectively, stealing mob money); and there are other absences: Mei’s seduction of the grumpy senior citizen, Mr Hunt (Geoffrey Hutchings), which somehow leads to their marriage of convenience; her best friend was evidently instrumental in helping her to leave her village for Chongqing, but she barely registers in the first act; and presumably Mei had a GP who arranged for her first antenatal visit and the ultrasound scan, but how on Earth did she swing that in light of her ignorance about British culture and her lack of papers?

Interestingly, once the screening was over and Guo returned to take questions from the audience, somebody asked simply if she liked the central protagonist of her film. Frustratingly (deliberately or otherwise), the question got lost and no answer was forthcoming, but it nevertheless raised an important issue about She, A Chinese’s autobiographical status, and of Guo’s relationship to a girl who may or may not be a film-idea of her self. It’s clear we aren’t meant to “like” her in the traditional sense (of the redundant, i.e., “transparent” figure of the classical narrative), but it’s alright to feel attracted to her because she is “enigmatic,” because she is “risky;” the trouble is, she’s also sullen, wan, and more than a bit easy. Then there is the question of whether or not she is deliberately using her lovers, primarily to stabilise her own screwed up emotions. On that note, Guo has said that Mei is something of a “tease” despite herself, that she is not a “victim,” and that her lust for everything ranging from the close personal intimacy of relationships and the passion of fucking (all equated with a swollen appetite for food), to the environment itself and the aural sensation of living in a vibrant, otherworldly city is what fundamentally steers her through life. So whether or not we like Mei isn’t, perhaps, a concern; the film’s success hinges, rather, on the authenticity of her desires and the strength of her lust for new sexual partners; I also think, therefore, that our personal identification with the joy, passion, disappointments and failure of her experiences is a key part of this: the film, finally, immediately, mirrors us. Two points, then: 1) I personally don’t buy Guo’s claim that Mei is a tease (to me, this admission sounded polemical), and if her character is intended as such then she is partly redeemed by the fact that her loves and her lovers, by and large, mistreat her just as flatly: Rachid (Chris Ryman), an Indian Muslim, abandons her once she is pregnant; a petty gangster (Wu Leiming), likewise, when she rejects his advances; and was it not simply a matter of time before her relationship with the nameless hitman (Wei Yibo) was soured by infidelity and physical abuse? 2) Many critics have pulled up the film for being little more than a series of sketches, a writer’s portmanteau of episodes which intentionally frustrate our “desire to understand.” I don’t have a problem with Guo’s approach (I think it just about substantiates any anti-classical stance she may have): to me, the film regards its characters and events with a privileged intimacy; it carries a point of perspective that is highly personal in grammatical terms. I don’t like to draw on the term “vignettes,” if only because I feel like I’m trading on language personalised by another, but the term nevertheless infers a mode of thinking, a means of private expression, that I think characterises the film. She, A Chinese is a life in vignettes; it is a life of vignettes also.

As I’ve said, it feels like a mature yet angry piece of filmmaking that’s not without some genuinely uncomfortable (for being so authentic) emotions—emotions which speak to anyone who has moved on perhaps prematurely from a lover to prevent a situation from deteriorating further, or even anyone who has simultaneously admired and loathed from afar those endlessly fortunate few who move from relationship to relationship without a sense of real loss or affection, and who seem to do so to their own great advantage. The “survivors” of our kind.

29 October, 2009

Mother (Bong Joon Ho, S Korea, 2009)

2009-10-23T13:57:00.043+01:00

Mother and the Cultural Remasculinisation of Korea

FILM MOTHER DIRECTOR BONG JOON HO

I want to use this space to discuss a few things highlighted by Bong Joon-ho's new film, Mother, and if possible draw them back to a broader dialogue about nation, about national victimisation and infantilisation (as it relates to family, and maternal and paternal subjectivity).

Let me just briefly mention a vital Korean study by Kim Kyung Hyun (2005), “The Remasculinisation of Korean Cinema.” As Kim describes it, contemporary Korean cinema up until the millennium (he clarifies “1999”) invokes feelings of personal self-loathing, institutional repression, and a damaging sense of shame; critically, this regime is gender-specific. In the context of this reading, the fallen man becomes the subject of Korean cinema: a masochistic plaything in some narratives, an infant who stutters “ŏmŏni” (mother) incessantly in others. Kim ties these themes to several historical and cultural developments in Korean society:

1. the crises of the latter half of the twentieth century, during the era of military rule.
2. the deliberate phasing out of the “national” (in terms of traditional culture and identity) for a transnational Korea.

The first category of changes include: the civil war, 1950-1953; the ensuing cold war between North and South; the sensitive subject of America’s involvement in the latter's economic rejuvenation; the assassination of dictator, Park Chung Hee in 1979; the subsequent rise to power of general Chun Doo Hwan in 1980, and the devastating Kwangju massacre that largely resulted. (Kwangju was just as repugnant and utterly deplorable as Tiananmen, and has been dramatised most effectively in Jang Sun-woo’s A Petal (Ggotip, 1996), Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (Bakha satang, 1999), Kim Ji-hun’s May 18 (Hwaryeohan hyuga, 2007), and Im Sang-soo’s deeply moving, The Old Garden (Orae-doen jeongwon, 2007), which stars a favourite actress of mine, Yum Jung-ah). In the second development, under the globalising process that represents transnationalism, the "nation" of Korea is conceived increasingly in ways that move one beyond a consideration or critique of the nation-state to a Korean transnationality. Allied to America, its cinema closer to Hollywood, it is no longer a coherent unity, and this issue informs many of the films discussed in this post (yet, Korea has always been burdened with issues pertaining to “state” and “nation”). Within the cinema, its male characters play out or work through the effects of this new constitution, obviously a continuing process, and come to suffer personal crises that steer them either towards a life of violence or self-destructive masochism.

Police brutality, as evidenced in Im Sang-soo's melodrama
The Old Garden (2007), in which a socialist activist
retraces the most turbulent period of the 1980s with the
love of his life.

The hunt for a kidnapper, in Park Jin-pyo’s
Voice Of a Murderer (2007), ends in another failure.

I continue to find this interesting when it comes to cinematic depictions of the justice system, law enforcement and police authority—institutions that remain very masculine in composition and politics to this day, but which also suffer the burdens of the remasculinisation process which Kim describes. Many Korean films of late, for instance, underscore the fact that the police are either politically and socially ineffectual, or else straightforwardly inept on their own bureaucratic terms. Interestingly, these characterisations have survived the Hollywoodisation of K-cinema. Take a few popular examples: Jin Kwang-kyo’s Beautiful Sunday (2007), for one, follows a corrupt detective whose own guilt and self-loathing caused by a past traumatic experience lays the foundation for a fantasy in which he ruthlessly pursues a mystery killer. Then, there is Han Jae-rim’s The Show Must Go On (Uahan segye, 2007), a touching gangster film in which the Sadang police are neither ubiquitous nor necessarily an ongoing concern in the social power structure, which seems to be shared, rather, between the Dogs and the Jaguars crime families. The Chaser (Chugyeogja, 2008), a film in which the hero, a former cop-cum-pimp, crashes a police van full of cops in his pursuit of Min-ji’s kidnapper and works over a suspect on police premises, is on one or two levels a riff off Bong’s seminal Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok, 2003), of which more shortly. The point being that somewhere down the road in modern Korean history, between the political democratisation and globalisation movements of the nineties and the threateningly militant dictatorships of the 1960s through to the 1980s, Korean cinema has become increasingly critical of police authority at local and state levels, and of the law itself, which is more often than not undermined by routine procedure, sometimes desperately so. Lee Yeon-woo’s Running Turtle (Geobugi dallinda, 2009), while appearing to resist these dominating tendencies in its final scene (in which Jo Pil-seong’s unit put on a marching parade for the benefit of his daughter’s primary school class), must first work through a narrative that continually robs the detective, his colleagues and his bosses of professional competency. And if I remember correctly, Hwang Su-a’s lovely Why Did You Come To My House? (Woori jipyeo wae wassni, 2009) is fairly ambivalent about its investigating officers also, dependent as they are on a bittersweet monologue from Byeong-hee (Park Hie-sun) for information and ultimately clarification on an unsolved suicide.

Jin Kwang-kyo's Beautiful Sunday (2007). Despair drives
detective Kang (Park Yon-woo) to threaten the key
suspect in a murder case.

Song Kang-ho's gangster, Kang In-goo, grudgingly takes a telling off from the local cops,
in Han Jae-rim's The Show Must Go On (2007). His daughter, who reported him for asking her
to stab him, watches on.

Not tolerating arseholes. Detective Park Du-man
in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories Of Murder (2003).

Taken together, these films present an image of law enforcement in Korea, and to an extent the larger judicial system, that is at best corrupt and draconian, at worst juvenile, masochistic and dysfunctional. It’s little surprise, then, that Mother furthers the trend. A few years ago, however, and this may have come as a surprise. There is the suggestion at a certain point in the plot development of Memories of Murder that the police, aided by a specialist forensics team, are beginning to work together without contradiction; thus, they begin to project a sense of self that is defined by maturity and discipline and invention. Now, I know that some disagree with this reading, arguing that, on the contrary, the law is irredeemable while the fact is that the science of forensics, which surfaces quite late in the movie, remains, quite literally, unintelligible—a point I can accept. But I suggest that Bong’s film resists a totalising symbolic representation; just as the two detectives, Park Du-man and Seo Tae-yoon, mature together throughout the movie, the department undergoes its own process of maturation, such that it becomes collaborative, and networked, and communicative. Instead of denouncing them as inherently problematic and therefore hamstrung by incompetence, Memories instead dramatises the perpetual suffering of the authorities in Gyeonggi province, importantly, as they are busy learning to overcome and transcend their insufficiencies. What happens to the law, then, is finally phantasmal; failure is no longer structural, nor interdepartmental, it is metaphorically visualised beyond the boundaries of the police station: in the rain, in the fields and wildflowers, in the faces of the suffering. The disillusion of Park Du-man, dramatised so brilliantly in the denouement, signifies the law’s gradual disappearance from the corrupt urban spaces of modern Korean cinema—but only after it has arrived at some legitimacy, only after having found a sense of self in the new modernity.

Kim Sang-kyung's detective Seo approaches a new murder scene, flanked by
forensics teams and dedicated officers. Bong Joon-ho's Memories Of Murder.

With this in mind, Mother makes a good deal of sense: a story which begins with a mentally handicapped young man, Do-joon (Won Bin), who is brought in by police on circumstantial evidence and then coerced into signing a confession for the murder of a schoolgirl which, importantly, we did not see him commit, the film goes on to trace the difficult, intimate journey of Hye-ja (Kim Hye-ja), Do-joon’s poor single mother, as she seeks first to unpick the state’s case against him, and then uncover to the point of badgering her witnesses the truth from the local townsfolk. A handful of objectionable authority figures impede her way, each conforming largely to type: thus we get the imprudent lawyer who just wants more money and expends his energies in a karaoke lounge fondling pricey escorts; Yoon Je-mun plays a not altogether indecent character, but his cop errs on the side of intractability in his refusal to help Hye-ja once he has jailed her son; then there is Song Sae-byeok, Yoon’s “heavy” on the force whose fascination with the game of sepak takraw (a form of kick volleyball which he brings into the interrogation room) echoes the extracurricular activities of the violent Detective Cho (Kim Roe-ha) in Memories. In addition, Mother recapitulates motifs familiar from that film: the botched crime reconstruction, in which the team responsible for staging an again very public walk-through are similarly humiliated before the nation’s press; the importance of forced confessions as the key determinant of guilt, given more credence here in the absence of an “educated” cop from the city; and there’s an amusing gag about forensics teams and their growing infantile fascination with populist television shows, like CSI. Indeed, in a film that effectively canvases the opinions of a range of unhelpful professionals in law enforcement and the legal system, in addition to those civilians who are bereaved or in mourning and therefore incapable of seeing past the “red mist,” there is no better symbol of strength, loyalty or more crucially, competence, than the character of Jin-tae, played by Jin Goo. But, then, as Jin-tae himself comments at one point in the film, who can be trusted? And Bong sheds enough light on the key aspects of Jin-tae’s life—in one sustained sequence, Hye-ja secretively watches him having sex with his under-age girlfriend—to remind us that good and evil aren’t mutually exclusive.

Kim Hye-ja, in a field of long grass, before beginning the enigmatic dance which opens
Bong Joon-ho's Mother.

On the surface, then, it’s fair to say that Mother fits well into existing discussions about Korean gender empowerment and cultural remasculinisation. On the one hand, we have Jin-tae, in many respects a model anti-hero proud of his identity and (despite recent developments) military heritage, while on the other we have self-important figures within the bourgeois sphere, people like Hye-ja’s boastful attorney, the Mercedes Benz-driving golfers who view people of lower class stature (including the police themselves) with contempt, and most alarmingly, we have the brace of desperate, middle-aged men who exploited the disillusioned schoolgirl, Ah-jung (Moon Hee-ra), for sexual favours throughout most of her teenage life. The film not only holds that the remasculinisation of Korea is still a going concern in thematic terms, it suggests again that the nation is institutionally hapless, its authority figures (predominantly male) disreputable creatures.

I want to say one last thing about the film, in relation to memory. Mother is an intriguing portrait of one woman’s unflinching determination to prove the innocence of her only child. Importantly, Hye-ja’s actions are driven as much by psychic wounds, unhealed from the past, as by a sense of instinctive maternal duty. To me, the film reminded me a lot of the melancholia of Oldboy, a film which, for its part, evokes the romantic purity and innocence of the past in hopeful terms. Think of the cherished sequences recounted to Oh Dae-su by Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae) about his youth. The desire which lured Woo-jin and his sister intimately together, while representing emotions that are clearly abhorrent in the eyes of society, and therefore impure, is nonetheless affirmed as something beautiful in the film by virtue of the fact that it is a pure (i.e., authentic) emotion. The potency of this emotion finally proves devastating for Woo-jin. The intense anguish which is caused by the dissolution of their relationship (and guilt relating to her death) is so traumatising, even a decade later, that he can only stop the cycle of pain by taking his own life.

Fetishising that which is finally lost: emotions of youth.
Woo-jin's sister, Lee Soo-ah (Yun Jin-seo), in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003).

Both films, of course, ask important questions about the troubling effects of memory, and its relation to self-hatred. Oldboy creates a definite linkage between Oh Dae-su’s desire to forget his past life and the libidinal impulses that have driven him unknowingly towards incest, whilst in Mother, the sins that Hye-ja tries categorically to forget are multiple, though all can be critically examined against her misplaced but unquestioned faith in her son’s innocence. Neither figure emerges from their respective crises victoriously, but crucially (and this is one of the important aspects of the films for me) both characters continue with life. How does one arrive at that decision? How can one cope with, suffer, endure the deepest, harmful effects of memory—pushing one's descent further into misery? The characters of Mother and Oldboy must have reasons for living, but I think they remain unclear. Can the mind and body excite and inspire, does one live again, if the most painful aspects of our past are erased? In Mother, we see a startling glimpse of the carefree woman Hye-ja will become in the final scene of the film—upon performing the acupuncture that will blank her memory of events, she joins an enthusiastic band of partying travellers—but she is, finally, incoherent to us by virtue of the fact that we simply do not recognise this new character; she has lost her subjectivity, traded it; her mirrored self (in Do-joon) is therefore also, we assume, forgotten. Although there is perhaps no better option for Oh Dae-su in Oldboy—his lover, Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong), would never accept his suicide—he nonetheless escapes with her in an attempt to reconstitute the self; he will live, it is suggested, because she is in desperate need of him, and he dependent on her for care; yet Mi-do is suffering more in this arrangement, because she is rejecting a “new” life absolutely liberated from Lee Woo-jin. Whatever their outcomes, these films ultimately demonstrate the potential harm of memory. In failed love, memory eats us from within, our fondness for the past and a lost intimacy nurtures our sense of self-loathing; no longer a tendency, the act of remembering becomes ingrained, entrenched ritual—masochistic and destructive. The difficulty is, we must so regularly look back to the past in order to claim that we have any life.

Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae) collapses dead, having taken his own life.
Park Chan-wook's Oldboy.

The startling final credits sequence of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy,
where Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-shik) and Mi-Do (Kang Hye-jeong) live out their lives.

On this note, the two films differ largely in their intended outcomes: one leaves the viewer very clear about the “success” of the memory erasure, while the other instead appears to affirm its cruel and bitter failure. In the end, the mother dances her way to the front of the coach (and hence onward to a new life, bathed in the regenerative warmth and hues of sunshine), while the monster is forgotten on a cavernous mountain, doomed we suspect to a sour, ugly future with a mirrored version of his self in Mi-do. But above all, he is doomed to a life ensconced in the disappointments and evils of memory. That Mother concludes on a comparatively upbeat note does nothing to undercut the tragic sense of loss that has occurred—the loss of her child, and the loss of an existence defined solely by her child.

A lament for the dead; the cherished memory. Detective Kang and his wife, in Beautiful Sunday.

BFI 53rd London Film Festival: The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2009)

2009-10-20T16:00:00.023+01:00

The B.F.I. 53rd London Film Festival: Film On The Square

FILM THE INFORMANT! VENUE LEICESTER SQUARE

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Steven Soderbergh has followed Che, his two-part biopic about the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara starring Benicio del Toro, with The Informant!, the “sorbet” (as he put it yesterday) which marks his return to a commercial mainstream. It begins by unpicking the messy process of corporate whistleblowing—so we see Matt Damon’s corporate v.p. Mark Whitacre shepherded through the early stages of information-gathering at his company, Archer Daniels Midland (A.D.M.), the FBI all the while pushing the matter internally to release more departmental resources. But gradually, the film begins unpicking itself ... the working nature of the film becomes increasingly anthropomorphic, losing itself first to Whitacre’s monologues, and then to his narration. It’s a very smart film and Soderbergh handles the melding of the film’s "consciousness" with the character’s subjectivity in a deft and interesting manner.

The musical style particularly took my interest. It is arranged by Marvin Hamlisch, who scored Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run and Bananas (and evidently influenced Allen massively for Sleeper, which the director arranged himself I think). In last night's Q&A session, Soderbergh, together with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, described the musical accompaniment as “belonging” to Damon’s character; it is “in” him. More than a stylistic extravagance, then, each cymbal tap and whistle is motivated, the repetition narrational by design. Thus, the stylistic patterning of Hamlisch’s playful, jazzy score is consistent with Whitacre’s bipolar condition, such that the “narration” helps us simultaneously comprehend a scene and understand why we comprehend a scene as excess to the norm. Excess is also nicely conceived in the private experience of Whitacre’s voice-over, which provides its own rhetorical if batty logic, and which is seemingly at odds with the film-world events depicted. In one scene that nearly brought the house down, Whitacre considers the survival skills of polar bears. Being predominantly light-coloured furballs they reflect the white of the snow well, which makes it easier for them to stalk prey, but what do they do about their black noses? Thus ensues a monologue about coping mechanisms (they cover their noses, right?) and bear psychology! He concludes: “That’s a lot of thinking for a bear.”

Such moments keep the film pressing on at a pace, however, there are some problems with it. The central nerve of The Informant! involves a scene in which Damon’s Whitacre is finally confronted with the evidence that he has been deliberately misleading FBI agents Shephard (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Joel McHale), and that he has withdrawn deeper into a fantasy world of his own construction—he has not only embellished claims of corporate price fixing, he has deceived and extorted his own company—to which he responds, rather self-effacingly: "well, I need to go back to the hospital." Soderbergh reveals his bipolar condition gradually over the film’s course with sound comic effect. The thing is, we’re meant to believe ultimately that Whitacre is capable of demonstrating remorse, or at least the film flirts with that suggestion—Soderbergh himself describes this scene as “the cathartic moment” which he has been building to; he even privileges intimate close-ups to underscore the significance of the exchange. Interestingly, Manohla Dargis in her review for the New York Times, points to something else—she says that anger has driven the film to this point, such that “Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime gives the movie resonance and feeling.” That didn’t register with me personally, but it’s an interesting point. To me, feeling doesn’t enter into it, nor does the actual relevancy of the overblown scandal itself, which might as well be a McGuffin. What mattered was the fact that this man’s internal struggles were played for broad laughs, but we were laughing with him, not wholly at him; consequently, the decision to appeal to our sympathies, to finally underscore, however modestly, the nature of forgiveness in the prison sequences felt inappropriate and erroneous. But one bum note in a fun little satire this enterprising is hardly the end of the world.

10 September, 2009

Sick Nurses (Piraphan Laoyont, Thailand, 2007)

2009-10-11T21:17:00.008+01:00

Death Never Looked So Good

FILM SICK NURSES DIRECTOR PIRAPHAN LAOYONT, THODSAPOL SIRIWIWAT

In the UK and in the States, Suay Laak Sai is called “Sick Nurses.” It's also been given the exploitation tagline, “Death never looked so good:” an accurate summation as it turns out but one that’s too close to the bone for its own good. It’s about seven, nubile young things who, in addition to looking pretty good in cosplay, have been selling off the body parts of their less well off (i.e., dead) patients on the black market, until finally the tables are turned and one of their number is betrayed by the pack and summarily executed. Sounds like a stinker, and it is a stinker, save for two fairly significant conventions. A while ago I mentioned another peculiar little Thai film from Monthon Arayangkoon called The Victim. That film made a bold cultural statement about the evils of cosmetic surgery and the machinery of modern medicine, but it grounded these concerns within Thai culture explicitly as national issues. So, for example, the film trades on conservative anxieties that Thai women are preoccupied with the idea of star consumption, to the point of actual bodily substitution. In the intervening years, this conceit has since been turned into Sick Nurses, and the vengeful ghost motif at the heart of the narrative this time is a literal incantation of modern medical techniques and surgical expertise. To that extent, Sick Nurses grows out of a horrific vision of an industrialised Thailand wherein beauty continues to be unfairly selective and the promised democratic ideal of beauty is sadistically perverted in a medical sense. Say what you will about the delivery of the message in essentially exploitation terms, but what makes the film worthwhile is the recurrence of the idea itself and the ways in which it is interlocked with conservative themes of marital fidelity and familial obligation.

The second convention which rescues the film from bona fide stinker status is considerably more grotesque. Sick Nurses essentially follows a traditional pattern in contemporary Thai horror of combining scenes of absolute melodramatic excess with set-pieces of literally transgressive body horror—prosaic plot points that lull us into a comfort zone where we feel we’ve mastered the narrative trajectory as early as the credits suddenly give way to horror scenes simultaneously vile and unbelievable—such that the entire tone of the movie is arbitrarily flipped on its head and the viewing experience altered irreparably. Anyone who’s seen the film will recall the most memorable sequences in which the binge eating nurse and the two identical twins are forced to their deaths by the avenging ghost in ways again far too graphic to detail here … the thing is, they will also recall just how disproportionately out of kilter with the rest of the film these sequences are.

It’s become de rigueur to say that any East Asian horror film with an avenging spirit and a tragic-romantic sensibility is a direct spin-off from Nakata Hideo’s 1998 classic Ringu or its slew of localised pre-millennial imitators. Thai horror isn’t untouched in this regard, but it’s protected by its own indigenous traditions and has its own battles with Hollywood hegemony to resolve—this seems to be informing the genre more than anything. For instance, Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak (1999) is often held up as a powerful benchmark, and Bin Bunluerit’s Krasue (2002) signifies a sort of grisly, popular antithesis. In the end, Suay Laak Sai is both disposable and a footnote. Insofar as it’s a film about past injustices and the attempts of its female characters to make amends, it inevitably conjures up visions of Nakata’s wonderful back catalogue, from Ringu to Honogurai Mizu no Soko Kara. But it sits well in the Thai horror tradition. It is unbelievably silly (there are long, creeping tendrils of hair, it has girls falling in love all over the place and the ending is completely barking) but it gives an updated spin to the central theme which is the recurring criticism of glamour culture in Thai media. However seriously it takes its core subject, it’s clear that the film finally highlights a grey area in the kaidan tradition, one which is both unexpected and a valid topic for further discussion in horror studies.

11 October, 2009

A Note on Disconnecting From Horror: Martyrs

2009-10-11T21:15:00.006+01:00

A Note on Disconnecting From Horror

FILM MARTYRS DIRECTOR PASCAL LAUGIER

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Earlier this week I sat down to watch Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, a monumentally tough movie which came high on the recommended list for this year’s foreign language releases. Now, I’ve long considered myself a horror fan—not for nothing do I count, for example, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters amongst my best films of all time, together with Kim T’ae-yŏng and Min Kyu-dong’s Memento Mori and Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, both phenomenal pictures in their own right, with or without a horror label—but am I an evangelical horror fan? Afraid not. To answer that one I think you need to have seen and possibly owned the notorious video nasties (titles like Cannibal Holocaust and Driller Killer) and have a firm grounding in a range of national subcultural cinemas—the thriving subgenre of Japanese body horror is a good start, a fine entry level eye-opener being the more mainstream Tokyo Gore Police. The point being that while none of these movies are anything to write home about, the evangelical fan at least has an understanding of them and knows the repertoire of formal and aesthetic innovations that have gripped niche horror audiences worldwide since the seventies. So my response to Martyrs, perhaps, has everything to do with the fact that I haven’t seen any of these movies and am wholly, humbly dependent on David Cronenberg as my only reference point for any sort of body horror.

Still, Martyrs is a provocative piece which I intend to revisit at some time or another in the future, but for the purposes of this post I just want to record the fact that I turned it off at a very specific stage in the plot development and I haven’t since rejoined it. This isn’t because the film is poor (on the contrary I think it’s very thoughtfully produced with a clear reachable goal in mind); rather, it’s because it really isn’t easy. Really isn’t easy. The film’s thesis is actually pretty sound. Alongside Alexandre Aja’s Switchblade Romance for instance, another foreign language horror film which incidentally I think stands head and shoulders above the litany of US mainstream pap that Raw Nerve and Twisted Pictures are churning out and Lionsgate are distributing, the film is especially traumatising and goes some way to providing more than a heightened awareness of one’s own involvement and subjective response to cinematic trauma. Indeed, the very point of the film, for me, and the whole reason I was drawn to it in the first place, is that it pushes us over the edge, not into hope-less despair or unconditional terror, but towards transcendence, towards a perhaps philosophical dimension. As a writer that conceit has always interested me, this idea that somehow a revelatory end is not only possible in horror cinema but tangible, and that idea has powerful reverberations for the many apocalyptic statements that have been made in the more serious (and definitive) works of horror cinema since the seventies.

I confess it was impossible to stomach on the first viewing, which is why I give way unreservedly to the evangelical horror film fan on this one who is far more equipped to deal with the film than I. The moment of full disconnection for me arrived in a scene that involves rivets; needless to say, further details are neither practical at this point in this post, nor necessary—but as I said above, it isn’t easy, and this is the first time in a film that I’ve said no, I need a break from this, I know where you’re going with it and I can see the throughline in the narrative but I must take a run at this another time. As I’ve also said above, I sense and I’m assured that there is something profound and perhaps universally touching running parallel to the story, and I’m very interested to finally learn how and in what ways the filmmakers dramatise what I believe to be a spiritual dimension against something so terrifyingly real. I’m also keen to learn what images are used in a grammatical sense to conjure the central protagonist, i.e., Anna’s, inner consciousness at the moment of terrible release. Like I’ve said, I expect it to be a profound moment in modern cinema, a cinephiliac moment of the sublime.

11 October, 2009

South Korea's First Rotoscoped Film: Life is Cool (Choi Ik-Hwan, 2008)

2009-05-27T22:04:00.050+01:00

South Korea's First Rotoscoped Film: Choi Ik-Hwan's Life Is Cool

FILM LIFE IS COOL DIRECTOR CHOI IK-HWAN

Definition: rotoscope
A rotoscoped animation presents an artistic re-creation of live-footage elements—characters, mise-en-scène, landscapes—the original pre-recording of which is used by animators as a frame-to-frame blueprint, or pre-visualisation, for the film. Recent examples include A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, 2006), and The Lord of the Rings (dir. Ralph Bakshi, 1978)

About this time last year, Korean movie audiences were treated to yet another national "first" in the form of Geunyeoneun Yebbeotda, or Life is Cool (dir. Choi Ik-Hwan, 2006), a fully rotoscoped feature-length animation. It’s about a friendship between three thirtysomething men who, at various points in their lives, all become smitten by the same girl—a girl who perpetually returns to haunt them in the form of passionate and often painful memories which they are doomed ever thus to revisit. It’s a sentimental story, which Choi handles well without being mawkish or moralistic. The important element here is the rotoscope animation, and hence the question: is it necessary? Choi’s previous feature was the fourth instalment in the popular Yeogo goedam horror series, Voice (a.k.a., Voice Letter) which was fine but ultimately strayed too far from the themes (of psychosexual development and emotional supplementation) which form the bedrock for Whispering Corridors and Memento Mori. Voice did at least have a visual flair which compensated for the generic turn of its predecessor, Wishing Stairs, and indeed it’s a characteristic which I’m glad resurfaces in Life is Cool. The decision to stylise sequences according to their emphasis on character, tone, or theme is one such example. The elegant, photographic nature of the bedroom scene, in which Tae-Young (Kang Seong-Jin) and Yeon-Woo (Park Ye-Jin) cuddle together in bed, allows for a more intimate sense of engagement than the acidic aesthetic qualities of Sung-hoon’s (Kim Jin-Soo) graduation scene, or, of more relevance, Yeon-woo and Il-gwon’s (Kim Soo-Ro) chat on the aeroplane. The hybridising of different animation styles serves Choi’s thesis admirably, but is there anything substantial to this? Does it offer a new interpretation for contemporary audiences?

It’s been two years since I last saw A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater’s twisting, knotted adaptation of Philip K Dick’s trippy source which popularised rotoscoping as a cinematic technique for contemporary mainstream audiences. I think I’m right in saying there was almost every advantage to be gained by reconfiguring the original live-action footage of that film into hand-drawn animation cells: the process made A Scanner Darkly an instrument of frustration, as well as eye-pleasing fantasy, and as an experiment it served the hallucinogenic possibilities of the source perfectly well. I think Life is Cool benefits from the rotoscoping process in key instances—there are some nice flights of fancy at a basketball game, for instance, and of course there is the mid-air waltzing finale which, I think, Choi should perhaps have closed the film with—but I'm tempted to question the value of this style of experimental animation, it is ultimately underwhelming. A couple of reviews I’ve noticed point out that the animation swings in different registers, specifically when it comes to the actor’s performances: many take it as a failing that the process itself creates a distance between the original dramatisation—the signs of which (the echoes of the organic) we read into the illustrations as we’re viewing the film (we can watch the live-footage for critical comparison using the multi-angle feature on the DVD)—and the dramatic quality of the finished article. Character’s faces are impossible to read. Passion, desire, doubts, longing, little is presented adequately. This said, the imprecise, patchwork style of the film is built for movement and speed and not subtle inflection and gesture. The film makes meaning, therefore, by conveying the pure thrill, the energy and vibrancy, of being alive—right down to the dizzy spells one character experiences during a botched attempted suicide.

A case can be made, therefore, for the way in which the film explores subjectivity. At an extreme, Life is Cool is a film about vocal performances and aurality. Here, the same act of listening, of tuning into the cadences of a particular character’s speech, of deciphering the often unintelligible use of US-inflected English from Korean, takes on more power. In another example, when Yeon-woo and Il-gwon kiss passionately for the first time the bland non-action of the "animated" scene brings a new dimension to the fore—a dimension which constitutes its own film-world. As the characters kiss, the film acts with them, lightly brushing the fabric of Yeon-Woo's top, breathing for them both. Consequently, this more "immediate" form of presentation offsets the great distance between the original dramatisation and the artistic re-creation. It does so with a realist force that skilfully makes up for the shortcomings of the animation. Is this the best way to tell the story? Probably not—and I’d imagine the artists who spent 2 years reconfiguring the footage would be beside themselves if they ever thought this was the case. The audience is expected to explore something new, to make sense of the world from a new perspective. The thing is, it isn’t the artistic re-creation we’re exploring; it is the film’s wonderful soundtrack.

27 May, 2009

Terminator Salvation: a trailer for Filmosophy

2009-05-12T14:44:00.055+01:00

A Trailer for Filmosophy

FILM TERMINATOR: SALVATION DIRECTOR McG

Like a number of Terminator fans out there, I’m concerned that Halcyon’s Terminator Salvation, surely the likeliest contender for biggest disappointment of the Hollywood year if things go belly up with the target market, is going to go belly up. The reasons are few, but hefty: clearly, the director is a concern; visually, there’s some toing and froing around the conventions set down by the likes of The Road Warrior (or Mad Max II) and Das Boot (oddly even Spielberg’s Schindler’s List); I also cringe at the insurance policy casting of Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese—the sort of compensatory gesture towards a LaBeoufian teen audience which makes you want to boycott the film entirely. But it’s also looking very promising on the upside. Not for nothing has the crucial Baleisation of the film returned the series back to the shifting (and core franchise-setting) notions of memory, history and identity. “Forget the past,” the trailers tell us. The paradoxical circularity that entraps those other films is self-defeating. Salvation isn’t one “possible” universe, it is its own universe, and that’s very reassuring. It suggests that the film is thinking in terms of concepts, that it wants us to feel something that we or it can’t properly articulate. What’s interesting about it at this stage, is that the trailer, the more recent one and the one I want to discuss briefly here, appears to be doing some thinking, too. Who would have thought?

First of all, what are we talking about? Released some time ago back in March, the third trailer in the Salvation canon can be found currently playing on the Warner Bros website (and not the dull one designed by Sony, who is handling international distribution)—or rather, it’s the one with NiN’s “The Day the World Went Away” blasting your living room to pieces. It’s interesting for two things. Clearly, its greatest asset is a horrific little sequence in which Christian Bale’s resistance leader John Connor, confronts a man who is to all intents and purposes a POW (played by Sam Worthington): shackled, bloodied, injured, but most importantly completely unaware of what he has become in the aftermath of Judgement Day. It’s at this point that Bale unclips Worthington’s head restraint, revealing the truth to him, to us. It’s an effective cinematic moment, but as anyone who's spent time thinking about the nature of physical existence and bodily change will know it is equally a chilling subjective experience, pitiless and inescapable. Daniel Frampton has this wonderful proposition (one that I’ve discussed before) that film thinks and feels in its own way: essentially it (film) is the characters, the incidents and story. Frampton develops this into an entire philosophy for film in his "manifesto for understanding cinema," Filmosophy, so he, understandably, doesn't expand filmosophy to trailer spectatorship. But I think the trailer comes close to finding, or being, its own form of consciousness, too. Salvation thinks in terms of personal trauma and displacement; we see realities displaced by reality. In the Worthington sequence, we even witness how it thinks dissolution into being, literally to the point of collapsing a whole section of the mechanical world into rubble in the very next shot. (This in turn establishes a subtext for modernity, mechanical reproduction, etc.) The second interesting thing about the trailer is this notion of temporal circularity. We’re told by Christian that, “this is not the future my mother warned about,” “I thought I knew our enemy,” and, “I’m not sure if we can win this war.” We expect this of a trailer, it’s a classic rhetorical appeal promising innovation. But it’s precisely because of this promotional agenda that lines like, “if we stay the course, we are all dead,” are likely to get lost. I have to say that for me it stands out in a way that is very provocative, it remystifies the universe, takes it out of that awful zone of familiarity which we’ve come to associate with the modern blockbuster.

It’s totally true that, just as a film creates its own energy by bringing into relation all manner of ideas, thinkings and emotions, so too does the film trailer, perhaps the most influential marketing tool an event campaign can carry. Some trailers, you’ll notice, play with concepts that are beyond the reach and scope of the film, some just boil down into sample form ideas that aren’t even there in the first place. Good trailers think with film concepts, they think in a way that moves beyond sound and vision to get you to believe in them. Take the aforementioned scene with Worthington and Bale. Here we have the literal shock of technological trauma at close quarters, and it works precisely because it gives us enough space to feel the character’s helplessness, that sense of being rendered utterly and frighteningly inert by a reality that is re-presented to you … and yet, bundled together in that overwhelming subjective experience is this idea of artificial origin. It’s hardly a groundbreaking notion, but I think one to be applauded because it detracts from the core thesis of Blade Runner, the most influential filmic text for synthetic human narratives. The real shock of the scene, therefore, derives not from what we see with our own eyes, but what we, what Worthington’s character, feel about this technological symbiosis. The trailer expresses these emotions with fantastic clarity. It says that bodily transformation is entirely natural, it says that technological trauma visited upon the body is not ungodly, is not degenerative. Why? Because the body doesn’t feel that change, and the body does not remember—to the point that nothing, not even flesh, is relevant to our being human. We must toss out that idea. Memory, identity, reality—nothing is re-programmed when technological symbiosis occurs, only re-presented. There is, therefore finally, no “substitute history” (Bukatman, 1997).

Salvation looks like the perfect counterpoint to Cameron’s universe. I hope that, like The Dark Knight, it delivers on some of these issues. But more than anything, I hope it makes us feel uneasy about our own constructedness, in a way that's insightful and memorable.

12 May, 2009

Spirited Away (Miyazaki Hayao, Japan, 2001)

2009-05-12T03:10:00.028+01:00

Chihiro and Lin Attend to the Stink God

FILM SPIRITED AWAY DIRECTOR MIYAZAKI HAYAO

One very good reason to love Take Care Of My Cat: Actress Bae Doo Na

2009-04-22T11:59:00.050+01:00

One Very Good Reason to Love Take Care of My Cat

ACTRESS BAE DOO NA

So I’m scrolling through the daily Twitch postings, an attempt to pick up on some of the news I’ve been missing over the last month, and it comes as no real shock to see this headline: “Bae Doo-Na: Floating Sex Doll.” I probably need to qualify that, right? Actually, the “floating sex doll” bit doesn’t surprise me (I mean, it actually makes absolute sense for the bonkers Japanese film industry); it's the "Bae Doo-Na" bit that does. The film, entitled Kuuki Ningyo (Air Doll), offers a snapshot of the lovelorn suffering and melancholia of a Japanese sex/air doll when she abandons her owner so that she can go looking for "real" love. It’s based on an original Japanese manga; by accounts, it promises to be as sweet as nuts; and it’s clearly about the philosophical exploration of the nature of the emotional, physical and bodily other, the non-human. (Alright, stop laughing because Air Doll may well turn out to be strong festival fare.)

According to the Fortissimo Films webpage, Doll is an all-Japanese production, crewed by Japanese filmmakers and players, and helmed by Koreeda Hirokazu whose profound and upsetting Dare mo shiranai (Nobody Knows, 2004) screened in competition at Cannes in 2004 and won the Best Actor prize for young Yuga Yagira, the 14-year old lead. But here's the thing: Doll is headlining, very deliberately, with Korean actress Bae Doo-Na. And that's an interesting selection. For one, her casting recalls Park Chan-wook’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Ok, an extremely high-profile comic-romance which stars Lim Su-jeong as a mental patient who’s adamant she is a cyborg. I quite enjoyed the film, it has a seductive playfulness which keeps things rolling, although I think it’s one of Park’s least successful, but the point is it very clearly associates women with children, with childhood innocence, with childhood fantasy. It seems that Koreeda’s Air Doll shares a similar classic narrative trajectory, turning a frail young woman away from a life of servitude and moving her back towards innocence (towards the gradual discovery of her "soul"). And here the theme of childhood innocence comes into play again because, like Lim in Cyborg, Bae possesses a sort of natural beauty which works effortlessly to display the vulnerability and disorientation of unexpectedly pretty non-human girls; in that regard, her casting also brings to mind that of Ueto Aya in the adaptation of the popular manga, Azumi. But, really, this is all part and parcel of the game of targeting the cult fan boys. The second point is this: Cyborg was such a well publicised event outside of South Korea that it remains very much at the forefront of the ongoing struggle over just how Korean national cinema is perceived and made sense of internationally. Not for nothing does a film’s success like Cyborg’s invite questions about the connections between women and nation, and more specifically about how certain actresses are constructed, and construed, as being representative of a sort of Korean cultural cachet. This holds much more significance for Japan, of course, which passed through the recent kanryü boom and saw Korean pop culture flooding the market.

I thought about this and I realised that the two points converge (at the absolute extreme) in the dubious world of small-screen erotica. There’s an account written by Jasper Sharp (2009), in his historiography "Behind the Pink Curtain," which addresses the whole business of filmmakers poaching, in the midst of the kanryü boom, Korean actresses and models for use as alluring new subjects for the Japanese soft-core film market; apparently it made for a thriving sub-genre. This might all seem inconsequential, but it is of significance to questions of national identity and status, particularly of gender and sexual expression in film studies. Add to this the fact that a filmmaker as sharp and sensitive as Koreeda is directing, and it seems that Air Doll may be, to all intents and purposes, making a very real point about casting a Korean star as a toy for the Japanese market. So, yes, it is going to be as sweet as nuts, and sappy, and frivolous, and all those things, but it may just have something to say, too.

Still, I very much admire Bae—check out her turn as Cha Yeong-mi in Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, if you’ve read my review of the film, you’ll know I rate it above and beyond Oldboy and many other examples of contemporary trauma cinema. (And by way of an aside, she’s also a bit of a photographer when she isn’t acting, which makes her particularly foxy in my opinion; oh, man.) But I want to fly the flag, briefly here, for her performance in Take Care of My Cat. It’s a film about female camaraderie, directed by Chŏng Jae-ŭn (who, it’s worth noting, is a female director), which follows the gradual movement into adulthood of five twenty-year olds who were once inseparable best pals in the industrial port city, Inch’ŏn. Shin Chi-Yun, a film scholar I genuinely admire (she lectures over at Sheffield Hallam), has a thoughtful chapter which is well worth checking out comparing the film with Kwak Kyŏng-t’aek’s Friend in the context of the male-dominated buddy movie (see Shin & Stringer, New Korean Cinema, 2005).

The film very specifically circles the themes of sincerity and distraction in friendships, and it ends, wonderfully, with a new perspective, accepting the contradictions and regret and pain of broken friendships that belong in the past and meeting the onward rush of time with new hope and optimism. And Bae's character is key to this. You might not think it if you’ve seen any of the film’s publicity, but Bae’s character, T’ae-hŭi, is actually the most complex and intriguing of the crowd, not least for the fact that she follows to the letter, where others cannot, director Chŏng’s suggestion that each character should “have the tendency to leave if they are not happy with their owner.” And T’ae-hŭi’s resourcefulness and personal motivation stems directly from that nomadic resilience. As for the friendship side of things, it’s probably of no surprise that some partnerships, wracked by issues of control, fizzle out before perhaps they should, and that others counterpoint these losses by giving us all a shred of hope and some dignity about the future; no one should be left alone. But ultimately, I think of a quote from Chŏng used by Shin, which I’ll paraphrase here: relationships change, and we must keep on walking.

You may have already seen Bae in Gwoemul (The Host) as national (bronze) medallist archer Nam-joo, or The Ring Virus (this being the Japanese-Korean co-production, made after Ringu) or even Bong Joon-ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite (which is, unfortunately, still unavailable in this country), but if you’ve seen and liked Koreeda’s heartfelt Dare mo shiranai (which recently screened on BBC Three, I believe), then give Chŏng’s Take Care of My Cat a go; it's a Korean gem.

22 April, 2009

Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner Day at the BFI 2009 5

2009-03-23T21:06:00.007Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT RUTGER HAUER, PAUL M. SAMMON VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT BLADE RUNNER DAY 23 MARCH 2009

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Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner Day at the BFI 2009 4

2009-03-23T21:05:00.007Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT RUTGER HAUER VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT BLADE RUNNER DAY 23 MARCH 2009

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Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner Day at the BFI 2009 3

2009-03-23T21:04:00.009Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT RUTGER HAUER VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT BLADE RUNNER DAY 23 MARCH 2009

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Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner Day at the BFI 2009 2

2009-03-23T21:03:00.009Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT RUTGER HAUER VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT BLADE RUNNER DAY 23 MARCH 2009

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Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner Day at the BFI 2009 1

2009-03-23T21:02:00.008Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT RUTGER HAUER VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT BLADE RUNNER DAY 23 MARCH 2009

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Ridley Scott, Blade Runner Day at the BFI 2009 2

2009-03-23T21:01:00.007Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT RIDLEY SCOTT VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT BLADE RUNNER DAY 23 MARCH 2009

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Ridley Scott, Blade Runner Day at the BFI 2009

2009-03-23T21:00:00.009Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT RIDLEY SCOTT VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

EVENT BLADE RUNNER DAY 23 MARCH 2009

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Blade Runner Day at B.F.I. Southbank

2009-03-23T13:05:00.047Z

Blade Runner Day at the B.F.I. Southbank

EVENT BLADE RUNNER DAY VENUE BFI SOUTHBANK

Okay, so this post is going to be brief (hopefully)—a quick rundown on the event which saw me running around like a maniac all day with my camera. The thing was ordered around three huge guest appearances: Michael Deeley and Paul M Sammon, Rutger Hauer, and Ridley Scott. I attended all, beginning with a screening of the now a little unnecessary On the Edge of Blade Runner, Andrew Abbott's documentary made in 2000 and written by Mark Kermode. Actually, that's probably an unfair criticism, but in any case, it would have been utterly impractical to screen its more in-depth successor, the Dangerous Days doc, since the thing runs to three and a half hours and probably would have killed us all. Deeley then rocked up with Sammon for the Q & A immediately after.

A little later the two introduced a screening of the digitally remastered Final Cut, which was the CGI-tweaked edition released to disc and theatres not all that long ago. I was so pleased it held up, suffice to say that I've only ever known it on home-video and playing the 5 disc on my Plasma was about the closest I had been to truly working out what the fuck was going on in Ridley's cityscape. The special effects work was scanned in at four times the resolution for industry standard, so that's about 8,000 lines per frame; Vangelis was remastered for 5.1, and so too the soundtrack. Don't listen to anyone who says Blade Runner lives and dies on the strength of its score, Peter Pennell's sound edit is really compelling and made the whole thing exciting for me again. Well, that, and the Hades landscape—I've been mean about Ridley's virtual world before, and picked some holes in its execution on design terms, but the Hades opener, played on the big screen, is lots of fun. And keeping your eyes still is all part of that!

It was interesting to hear Deeley and Sammon speaking far more candidly in public on the professional relationship with the Blade Runner Partnership (otherwise known as Bud Yorkin and that guy whose name always escapes me, Jerry Perenchio; back then their company was Tandem Productions). Check out the Dangerous Days: Making of Blade Runner doc which appears on the 5 disc: Deeley says just about everything he can to avoid openly busting Yorkin/Perenchio on their past behaviour. And understandably so, given the high circulation and the potential for defamation. But it's such a shame the few quoted comments on the doc are so diplomatic because, going entirely on Deeley's anecdotal evidence at the B.F.I., Yorkin/Perenchio were just about incapable of dealing intelligently with any film industry.

Whether or not these events do any justice to current debates in critical theory is open for debate, of course. I've always tended to be cynical on that score because, really, the place for pursuing critical and theoretical issues in film is at SCMS or uni conferences; you cannot hope to balance special guest appearances (with marquee draw like Rutger Hauer) with analysis, particularly in a Q & A which intends to give a comprehensive overview of the production, not reception. To wit, author, Paul M Sammon. Chances are that if you read anything on Blade Runner in cultural and (film) industrial contexts, it will carry this fellow as a reference. Oddly enough, Sammon's Future Noir was my entry point to the film before the film and was like a beacon through my undergrad years. So to finally see a guy who so closely resembled, in looks, my postgrad teacher at film school took me by surprise. It's a weird world. Sammon was the consummate professional—the experienced chair who keeps everything turning with a good sense of humour.

Joining Sammon onstage after the screening of Ridley's Definitive Edition, Rutger Hauer lightened up the event with star quality and his unique charm. He provided the kind of bigger, meatier, gutsier post-film Q & A that these B.F.I. events really thrive on (only one speaker I've seen before compares, and that would be Danny Boyle); plus, he had every mischievous excuse in the book for revolting against procedure and interrupting Sammon to behave like the olympian prankster and sneak. Q & A highlight: Someone in the room wants to know if the tattoos on his character have any textual significance. Hauer loves the idea, but you can tell Ridley didn't exactly explain it away to him in '81, so he kinda downplays it as another unknowable "layer," something we all look at and wonder, "what the hell is that, now?" He interrupts Sammon twice (who's about to tell us all what Ridley told him in interview years ago on the subject) with a cheeky wave of his water bottle, adding, "I don't know the answer, but I'm curious if Ridley answers that question," which makes me appreciate his humour all the more. Finally Sammon gets in. "Well, I can tell you what he [Ridley] said to me." Hauer doubletakes, and nearly spits water across the stage laughing. God bless him.

And finally, Ridley, the only man who wasn't allowed to roam the building in a good-humoured, rum-flavoured state of self-satisfaction, joined the event for his Q&A. He'd apparently bought up 2/3 of the room for his own private guests (news of which unfortunately unsettled a few in the crowd, who hadn't been able to book online as a result), and later that night he became the 62nd recipient of the B.F.I. Fellowship (kind of like the bee's knees award for contribution to U.K. film and T.V. culture). Director Stephen Frears stepped in to take on presentation duties, and essentially made us all laugh for the first time in over an hour . . . Ridley is a fascinating man to listen to (and read, since I'm midway through his Interviews, by Knapp and Kulas, 2005) but he went on in his signature style about the usual ho-hum anecdotes (which tend to drag for the hardcore, who've heard about Veronica Cartwright falling on her arse umpteen times), and dropped one hell of a statement when he said Russell Crowe is probably the best actor in the world today (there is a time and a place for rhetoric, but never anything quite so featherbrained). Before the night was out, he'd roped us all into seeing Robin Hood when it's eventually done and dusted.

But in the end: all is well. Why so? Because I've finally arrived at that point where I can say, “I’ve had the pleasure of watching two film sequences—the Alien chestburster scene with John Hurt, and the Germania battle which opens Gladiator—in their entirety, in Ridley Scott's company." That is an unspoken, human moment that no one can give me in written form. Good job B.F.I.

23 March, 2009

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Complicit (3 February 2009, The Old Vic)

2009-02-05T21:16:00.023Z

Joe Sutton's Complicit

PLAY COMPLICIT VENUE THE OLD VIC, THE CUT

Kevin Spacey fans will know that Complicit, his latest stage production for the Old Vic starring the one and very certainly only Richard Dreyfuss, has garnered some less than glowing reviews recently in the UK press. Its central theme is essentially a repressive crackdown on critical news journalism: Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Kritzer has written a provocative paper on the illegal torture practises employed by the current (fictionally speaking) US administration, for which major transgression he is now being run through the shredder by a grand jury determined to pin down his primary source. On the one hand we have Kritzer and wife Judith (Elizabeth McGovern), who conveys the claustrophobia and frustrations of traditional family life in upper-middle class America, and the other David Suchet’s Cowan, the not-quite human, fuckeveryone lawyer who pretends to defend his client with love and sincerity. And Kritzer, caught at ground zero, is beginning to flirt with the idea of martyrdom.

It’s a topical set-up and Joe Sutton’s text conjures the familiar image of an American government sadistically devouring itself amid the ongoing, maddeningly indefinable War on Terror. The thing is: there isn’t anything substantial or original about Complicit, and if you are looking, as I, for a play that’s going to be involving and move you to feel something for its characters, move you to feel something not about ethical debates but ordinary human vulnerability, ambition, desire, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Just look back over that plot: a journalist who once argued for the world to get tougher on terrorists, realises his mistake when his government violates the Geneva Convention, produces an incriminating article damning the administration for its brutality and is then taken to court on a charge of espionage. It sounds tantalising, but the play is concerned less with action than reaction. What we get, ultimately, is a debate about survival strategies and legal wrangling.

Complicit also has the dubious honour of being showcased in the round with multimedia feedback. Now, I have no problem with the CQS conversion, and if the proscenium arch returns for A Winter’s Tale I’ll be a little sad to see it go and have missed, therefore, The Norman Conquests (which motivated the conversion) after all … but the staging was quite rotten. In case you don’t know, in the round allows for artistic deviations at the level of staging from the classical norm, which means that very often throughout a three-hander like Complicit you will be staring at the back of somebody’s head. But that’s alright because this represents “life’s untidiness” and the unpredictable quality of daily reality creeping into the performance. That I don’t mind too much—but when I see Richard Dreyfuss, in the middle of a weighty breakdown/confessional scene, referring to my half of the audience and then he blatantly turns around to repeat the same line and mimic the same emotional beat for the benefit of the other half, that’s when I hold my hands up and say, I’m sorry, you’ve taken me completely out of the scene. And, frankly, the less said about the infuriating Andrew Marr interview the better.

There were a string of tabloid friendly stories before the run. The play was apparently delayed a week because the company needed “more development time;” in his role as director Spacey ate through several rehearsals debating politics with his actors; and rumours that Dreyfuss couldn’t master his lines filtered into the mainstream when he finally appeared onstage wearing a hearing aid for prompt. Many critics were unable to forgive Dreyfuss on the latter point, rightly stating that actors should be able to find something, anything, in the text that enables them to commit every line to heart, but in the performance I saw this Tuesday night he was absolutely splendid. The problem is that Sutton isn’t a dramatist of the calibre of, say, Peter Morgan, nor is Complicit anywhere near as sophisticated or cutting a legal tale as Tony Gilroy’s excellent Michael Clayton, and because of this, distracting stories about production woes and actual postponements work their way into the play’s architecture. And since it is absolutely flimsy at best—as a concept, as a character study, or as a tense antechamber drama—Complicit just cannot hold up under that level of scrutiny.

5 February, 2009

Exiled (Johnnie To, Hong Kong, 2006)

2009-01-03T16:24:00.004Z

Buddha Mountain

FILM EXILED DIRECTOR JOHNNIE TO

En route to a high-risk score, somewhere around the Buddha mountain, Johnnie To’s band of hitmen stumble upon a convoy of overturned police wagons and dying guards. Realising it's the score they were placed to intercept, the four lay low for a while to see what happens. The ensuing firefight plays out largely without their intervention, as one surviving cop fends for himself.

Sergeant Chen, the lone cop under fire from all sides, does most of the killing singlehandedly. As played by Richie Ren, he’s clearly the epitome of cool: resembling a young Hunter S Thompson no less (circa 1960/Puerto Rico), cigarette in mouth and sporting giant sunnies. From a technical level, glossy slow-motion, sharp focus pulls and wrap-around photography abound, the fetishistic lens swelling the character's repose and apparent disinterest in everything he is killing to the whooping, daffy heights we expect of a To movie. When all is done, Chen is disarmed and recruited into the gang. An awesome introduction.

3 January, 2009

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2008)

2008-12-16T13:57:00.002Z

Why So Serious ... ? Not Nearly Serious Enough

FILM THE DARK KNIGHT DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

You may have noticed a proliferation of Batman-specific Academy ads across the web of late. Warners is doing a sterling job (have you seen Daily Variety?) informing those of us with attention spans of the importance of Charles Roven, Emma Thomas, and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the latest contender for the prestigious title of "Best Picture." The ever-supportive fan contingent are busy, too, pounding the message home, although they only really seem to care that it teach less worthy winners of the past a thing or two about true Oscar dominance. Best Picture winners like James Cameron’s Titanic, which was horrible, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, which was better, and Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King which proved the Academy is nothing if not stupid … these pictures were designed as big-budget prestige films that espouse Academy values, where The Dark Knight, by the director’s admission, clearly was not. But it does belong in a category of blockbuster film that craves artistic legitimacy (and not in the way that Marvel's The Incredible Hulk went about doing so this year by casting a Hollywood intellectual in the lead), so it isn't a surprise to see studio Warner Bros. sniffing around for nominations. Nolan wants his audiences to spend some time thinking about his movie, not merely as an intellectual puzzle which is there to be mastered, but as a serious conceptualisation of the relation between society and its chain of abnormal social outcasts.

It’s also, curiously enough, a film which spends most of its time dwelling on the aftermath of its predecessor, and when it isn't, Nolan commits to repeating that film's origin framework. Where Batman Begins explored Wayne's training to overcome his anger and diminution of personal power, The Dark Knight spends its time fraying the edges of his human identity, so that we’re ultimately left with a newly criminalised superhero, a not-quite-moral creature with the capacity to strike real fear into the hearts of criminals because of the misperception that he has himself crossed the line. And this despite the promise of the title, "the dark knight" (which should really have been applied more thoughtfully to the next film, surely).

At some point in any discussion of the Nolan films, you have to address the fan-boy issue, and the elephant in the room is, clearly, the fact the Nolans are skewing the franchise slightly older, namely, to overgrown boys. The latest film is a smugly macho affair and there’s no getting around the fact that it connects with the worlds of modern slashers (because slashers figure large in our frame of reference). Batman Begins was praised because Nolan brought horror elements to the part of Scarecrow and the fear toxin sequences, and now, in The Dark Knight, we have a 12-A certificate and an antagonist who is fanatical in his pursuit of meaning through intense violence. I find it astonishing that grandeur (in the form of fashionable Hong Kong-inflected combat sequences, previously de rigeur) is now sidelined, whilst the promise of bleakness and the sinister implications of violence become the key marketable pleasures. I’d love Nolan to put his money where his mouth is, to embrace Ledger’s Joker as a crypto-Satanist and see where this struggle takes us without the comfort of a redemptive framework. That would be (to correct Kim Newman’s point in his fair review of the movie for Sight and Sound), more accurately, the modern equivalent of The Empire Strikes Back ending.

Alas, The Dark Knight isn’t Best Picture material (although that isn’t entirely a shame because why a great comic book movie should want to hunt around for Academy recognition in the first place entirely escapes me). This said, in aiming for visceral scares, haunting imagery, and a bleak, sinister register, the film seems to be announcing a certain seriousness about itself which the narrative can’t uphold. And key to this is Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face character. Since the Joker’s rationale all along has been that a noble man can be corrupted in the city of Gotham, Dent is confirmed as the fall guy par excellence, his corruption giving the Joker the psychic satisfaction of completion. Now, I’m sure the Nolans would stand by that as a conceit, and so too the film’s fans. Unfortunately, it all feels like a terrific breaking of trust, if only because Nolan promises a sort of redefinitive radicalism in the gathering gloom, then offsets it all by introducing a Schumacherian character whose design blueprint is, bizarrely enough, Jonathon Mostow’s cyborg from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. To say the least, Warner Bros has demonstrably learnt nothing from the Schumacher era.

It is the big disappointment of 2008 as far as event movies are concerned, both for what we have invested in it as a broad audience of cinephiles, and for its bloodyminded acquiescence to formula. It thinks that by involving incipient violence and dark things it must logically be exploring incipient violence and dark things, but, oh, how it isn't. There is a scene midway through the film in which Ledger’s bloodymouthed Joker and Batman are face to face in a police interrogation cell. It’s a pivotal moment in the film, firstly because it reveals the Joker’s ability to brilliantly outmanoeuvre the police, but crucially, because it shows that Batman can be manipulated, which the Joker does with great efficiency by snuffing out the only hope of love in his life. In many respects, the scene stands, doubly, for the conclusion of one film (which should be the successor to Batman Begins), and the ceremonial opening of a third (The Dark Knight). There are two reasons for saying this: 1) It’s the scene which finally reveals the Joker’s mentality: he represents an all-encompassing, anarchic evil, an evil that’s transgressive, that isn’t handicapped by the instincts of self-preservation—which we are told restrain ordinary criminals, like Lau (Chin Han), Jonathon Crane (Cillian Murphy) or Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts). His introduction renders the perpetrator who is fixed on material gain (circa-Batman Begins) inauthentic, a form of criminality that's now archaic; 2) it resolves any doubt over the future involvement of Batman as a crime-fighting figure by fusing his hatred for injustice with Bruce Wayne’s profound sense of loss in his personal life. There is no equivocation, the film seems to be saying (although you wouldn’t know it), about the future. Henceforth, Bruce Wayne and Batman are morally inseparable, the vocational aspects of superherodom now a mere indulgence and emblematic of a more innocent past.

In this regard, I think the shot of the Joker riding away from the police station to freedom, head hanging from the car window, possessing the night, is a magnificent expression of iniquity. This notion of the Joker as being somehow representative of total abandon finds its parallel in David Fincher’s Fight Club, a film which similarly, though not literally, follows anarchy through to its logical conclusion only for its protagonist to denounce anarchy as a way of life. The Joker may be a different breed, clearly, since he engenders something more than a straightforward challenge to capitalism and bourgeois morality, pulverising society, as he does, rupturing order for no detectable gain, upturning lives where there is ambiguity. And in Batman he correctly identifies plenty of ambiguity. But there the film’s dabbling in the bleakness of the world, in terms of an irremediable wickedness, in terms of violence, ends.

Some critics have said it's impossible to feel an affinity with the characters—that, despite the interconnectedness of Wayne, Lucius (Freeman), James Gordon (Oldman), Rachel Dawes (Gyllenhaal) and Dent’s lives, there is never any sense of the film holding us to events, so that we might understand its characters on deeper, emotional levels. But more than this, there is no understanding the Batman or Joker on an emotional level. Until the interrogation scene, Wayne has been largely a non-committal player, a playboy billionaire with the means to honour his late father’s dream to develop a city of light; yet the Joker’s intrusion, together with the devastating revelation of Rachel’s death, extinguishes (surely) all of that. Here, the Nolans provide the most exquisite canvas for holding us and Batman to the Joker’s atrocities, mercilessly committing Wayne, against his will and to the audience’s surprise, to the life of the Batman. It is a milestone moment, normality drenched in cruelty, an opportunity to scar, passed by without scrutiny or theatrical illumination.

All of which forces the question, how much longer can the Nolans continue turning this comic book franchise away from the light, thrusting it toward the dank gloom, all the while upholding a straightjacketing faith in human goodness? Fans of The Dark Knight will continue, no doubt, supporting the film in the Best Picture and Director categories, praising it above films like, There Will be Blood, or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. But as I’ve said already, in this discussion about Heath Ledger’s performance, you can only sensibly back a film if you make sense of what is there on the screen—the themes which it clearly develops, the unforgettable sense of being implicated or involved in a world that exists in a cinema of images. Hence the difference between giving the impression of legitimacy, and actually crafting it using the resources at your disposal. The Dark Knight is too deceptive for its own good, the incongruity between what it promises and what it delivers too substantive to be overlooked. It would like to be a showy dissenter, but it remains conservative, head-in-sand fantasy. What we need, still, is a more grown-up version of the Batman.

16 December, 2008

The Dark Knight: Heath Ledger and Academy marketing

2008-12-12T18:13:00.035Z

Heath Ledger, Dark Knights and Academy Marketing

FILM THE DARK KNIGHT DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

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There’s been some talk in the trades this year about how The Dark Knight co-star Heath Ledger is a guaranteed shoo-in for Oscar nomination at the 81st Academy Awards. Now that some of the dust has settled and we’ve all had a chance to see the film (and crucially appraise his performance as the Joker), the consensus is that Ledger will be nominated in the best supporting actor category where he will face two key contenders: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, for his performance in Doubt, and Michael Shannon for Revolutionary Road.

The nomination (when it comes) will be interesting for a number of reasons. For one, what is the Academy actually honouring in the case of Heath Ledger? How will it define what is being honoured? Will this be a posthumous tribute, celebrating a body of work that already includes one Academy nomination for best male lead in Brokeback Mountain (in which case his probable selection in the best supporting actor category is inappropriate)? Or will the Academy honour Ledger’s performance as the Joker specifically. I ask, because in the latter scenario, the award bestows a kind of cultural legitimacy on The Dark Knight that is usually only reserved for more prestigious blockbusters, something I take issue with.

Warner Bros began Academy marketing last month, buying the front cover of Variety and running two full-page ads inside (for Supporting Actor and Best Picture), both featuring stills of the actor. When the campaign moves into its next stage after Christmas, the studio will re-release the picture Stateside in IMAX cinemas for voting season. There is, then, a concerted effort underway to prime The Dark Knight for Academy notice (you can see banner advertising on the Variety homepage, now, and Warners' own awards site dedicated to the movie). But an interesting thing is happening. Last week, Variety ran its review of the Stateside DVD released by Warner Bros, noting the absence of a tribute to Ledger on the supplementary extras. It’s interesting because the UK release has followed suit, putting an emphasis on its achievements in the various technical (as opposed to the performance) categories, but not before giving the director, Christopher Nolan, the sort of recognition best befitting a French impressionist painter for godssakes. I also noted with a sense of deflation (watching the film for the first time this morning), the lifeless intertitle in memoriam during the credits, which is barely held long enough onscreen to anyone’s satisfaction. None of this convinces me, especially, of the studio’s enthusiasm for Ledger’s work. More to the point, it confirms my suspicion that it knows Ledger will get the posthumous Oscar, and it must now do everything it can to convince people that its other elements are equally superior, boosting the film in the prestigious categories of director, film, and leading actor. That bothers me.

There is another side to this: the Academy. The LA Times raised the point last week that Oscar hype isn’t what it used to be. In marketing terms, the Ledger news story carries enough "general interest" to draw big TV audiences back to the coming year’s ceremony, if handled with compassion. As David Germain writing for the Associated Press also pointed out this week, "a supporting actor slot at the Oscar nominations [on] January 22 would come on the one year anniversary of Ledger’s death." What we have, then, is an unfortunate scenario, in the event of an Oscar win for Ledger: Warner Bros is more profitable because The Dark Knight can claim artistic legitimacy in the global marketplace, and the Academy benefits from publicly honouring Ledger’s achievement (in doing, sentimentally reaffirming the public’s perception of it as a respectable global institution that cares about its artists).

Now, I think Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker is nothing short of captivating, and I have always liked listening to him when he’s in interview (usually doing press for a movie), but I think this whole sorry Academy business will do more harm than good. In the end, a distinction must be made between the actor, and what he has actually been able to put up there on the screen, and I don’t think The Dark Knight, in its present theatrical form, deserves to enjoy the success its campaigners so desperately crave at the Oscars by appealing to Academy voter sympathies. If Academy marketing raises public awareness of the actor and helps to bring more films like The Brothers Grimm or Brokeback Mountain within the reach of all by bestowing a new legitimacy on them, then absolutely fine, I am in agreement that the whole process of campaigning will have been constructive and helped raise awareness of a genuine talent: a daring actor who modestly challenged the critical and commercial orthodoxy. But the studio wants a return on its investment, it is fishing around (disingenuously I believe) for status, wanting to affirm its middlebrow superiority over Hollywood’s other blockbuster pictures—and I object to it doing so on the back of Ledger’s involvement in the film. Key word here being, "involvement." I don’t, therefore, think the film should be praised for Ledger’s personal ambition as an actor.

Let me restate my position: Ledger is terrific in the film. He takes, what is essentially, a supreme contrivance (the fetish smile covering a disfigured villain), and puts together something which is anonymous, and sadistic, and violent, and perceivably mortal. That is very encouraging for the direction of big-budget blockbusters, today. But it’s very important that we distinguish, I think, between screen performances that bring legitimacy to a big effects picture, and performances that give the impression of bringing legitimacy, and it's into this latter camp that The Dark Knight falls.

Here’s why. It should be exclusive to the Joker and all of his grievances, but it isn’t. It is, instead, a big, long, fun contrivance that engulfs far too many characters. It also, ultimately, commits the cardinal sin of involving a pantomime villain that only merchandising planners could love. I am thoroughly fed up with films, like The Dark Knight, that pander to the relative use value of comic book fans, whose influence, I can only presume, is evident in the decision to reference so persistently the Batman: The Long Halloween series (launched by DC in 1996), which tells, among other things, the origin story of supervillain Two-Face. The real disappointment, therefore, is that Ledger doesn’t get anywhere near enough screen time. It’s a film about merchandise, it isn’t an actor’s film. Indeed, it’s a pretty clear-cut example of a film whose narrative follows the marketing strategy, first establishing the Joker as an indomitable presence, then subsuming him entirely in the shadow of a villain no-one cares about. Whatever else is right or wrong with the film, it deliberately short-changes us when it comes to the involvement of the Joker, and since Heath Ledger’s rendition of the character is absolutely note perfect, it’s a real shame that the filmmakers need insurance in the form of a second, unnecessary villain. I don’t care if the comics say that Two-Face’s origin story is historically intertwined with the Joker, so you cannot have the one without the other, I want to see a great film, and the last time I looked, Christopher Nolan was being praised as a formal innovator.

Heath Ledger should be praised. In the context of blockbuster filmmaking, indeed any mainstream filmmaking, his is a fine performance, surpassing I think most of our expectations. But we need to remember that without Ledger, The Dark Knight is nonsense, and the sad fact is: the Nolans prefer the nonsense.

12 December, 2008

Hansel and Gretel (Yim Pil-Sung, S Korea, 2007)

2008-12-08T18:41:00.025Z

What Lies Beneath the Surface ...?

FILM HANSEL AND GRETEL DIRECTOR YIM PIL SUNG

So the latest South Korean horror movie to get its UK premiere is Yim Pil-sung’s Hansel and Gretel, the 19th century fairytale which we're all likely to have grown up with and heard about by way of the Brothers Grimm. Now, the New Korean Cinema has received hefty criticism of late, mostly for its big-budget international hits, and the argument goes something like this: K-blockbusters are an absolute hodgepodge of elements—they interweave traumatic, hardgoing, often painful tales about suffering and dysfunctional families with the crashing, blockbusting genre codes of adrenalised thrillers and psychological horror, effectively enmeshing social problematics and personal crises with truly sublime cinema and pantomime stupidity. It's a reckless criticism to apply to Korean blockbusters because, let's face it, Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad, The Weird is absolutely marvellous and deserves to be seen by everyone, but for some titles it is, unfortunately, very close to the truth. Take Na Hong-jin's The Chaser, for instance, a film which plays to the myth of the Korean blockbuster by recapitulating the lessons unlearned from Chang Yun-hyŏn’s Tell Me Something.

The plot of Hansel and Gretel concerns father-to-be, Eun-soo, who jack-knifes his car one morning on a remote stretch of country road and awakens later, to all intents and purposes mobile-less, in the thick of dense woodland. Yeong-hee emerges in the dead of night, an unsettlingly flirtatious presence—with ruby lips and round, expectant eyes—and shepherds him back to her family cottage, the magical "Home of Happy Children." There, she introduces her saccharine but clearly anxious parents, and other equally puzzling siblings: Man-bok, her 13-year old brother, is short-tempered and impulsive, and young sister, Jung-soon, is the veritable household pet: adorable, needy, and coddled by everyone. No surprise then that the cute darlings are actually holding their parents (a pair of strangers) against their will and ordering them to pose as a happy family. Thus, Eun-soo is little more than the latest adult to inhabit a peculiarly static world wherein parental authority, or at least the impression of parental authority, is viewed to be paramount. What we get, then, is a whole host of issues, ranging from the absurd (kidnapping and full-blown cannibalism) to the truly upsetting (actual sexual abuse), as Eun-soo is literally besieged by the warped social relations and sadistic impulses of a dysfunctional family which is always overcompensating for the absence of adult authority figures.

Now, I saw the film on the Southbank with a packed daytime audience at the National Film Theatre, and to my ears it played pretty unevenly. In its defence, Hansel and Gretel does give its audience a pretty tough time of it, specifically in its emotional third act. It does, too, in the final resort, overcome the resistible call of its let love conquer all message by delivering the kind of ending that’s destined to produce a genuine tear … you will certainly have felt something by the time the three surviving children turn their backs on Eun-soo and retreat into their world of self-imposed isolation.

But here’s the thing, and it's quite an important thing: Guillermo del Toro changed the fantasy-horror landscape for good in 2006. He did so with the gloriously imaginative Pan’s Labyrinth, a film which won Academy Awards for best achievement in art direction, cinematography, and make-up, and all for very good reason. The drawback these days for many pedestrian filmmakers, including Tim Burton unfortunately, is that Pan’s Labyrinth has made it almost an unconscionable act to present any kind of pre-materialist fantasy-based "reality" without putting some extra effort into production and concept design. The vast majority find this an almost Herculean task to grapple with. Burton’s films have suffered from the same neglect for years, but only now are we beginning to realise this and truly understand to what extent these films actually fall short; similarly, Yim’s Hansel and Gretel. The film should, by rights, be something of a repository for imaginary critters, fairytale tropes and subterranean arching passageways. This isn’t, after all, the adult Eun-soo’s film, for it belongs to the kids, they conjure the world we see, and they have the capacity to wish for anything … but, disappointingly, it draws the bulk of its bunny-related imagery, of which Yim is peculiarly fond and there is an alarming amount, from Kubrick’s The Shining and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.

But the main problem isn’t the lack of an inspiring visual world, it’s actually the decision to make a blockbuster horror out of it at all. At its core, Hansel and Gretel isn’t a morality tale, it’s a fairly hard-going, personal drama about child abuse in an orphanage, about rape revenge, and then, finally and still very seriously, about childhood corruption and wilful self-delusion. It’s crying out, in fact, to be something other than the standardised Korean horror film. That Yim, his backers, and distributor CJ Entertainment opted to go with the formula, rather than work against it, is, again, depressing indeed. In its original guise, the film may have had something intelligent and thoughtful to say about the perversion of parental authority; moreover, because this perhaps hasn’t been covered so often, it might even have said something about the retreat of three once good but now very screwed up, impressionable children into an immersive fantasy world that exists only in their damaged hearts. (Not for nothing, for instance, does Yeong-hee have such trouble articulating herself in a manner that isn’t apparently solicitous; full of desire she most certainly isn’t, but the only language she can use with adults is that which she has been forced to use before in the company of her abuser, principally, as a means of establishing confidence and trust.) That’s the kind of picture Korean filmmakers should feel confident enough to bring to the international market, and not the sort of lamentable, catch-all blockbuster that’s designed only for a three weekend stint in domestic cinemas.

8 December, 2008

Kim Jee Woon at the Barbican 2008 3

2008-11-06T21:14:00.007Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT KIM JEE WOON, LEE BYUNG HUN VENUE THE BARBICAN

EVENT THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD OPENING GALA,
THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 6 NOVEMBER 2008

related images >.

view gallery >

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Kim Jee Woon at the Barbican 2008 2

2008-11-06T21:13:00.005Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT KIM JEE WOON VENUE THE BARBICAN

EVENT THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD OPENING GALA,
THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 6 NOVEMBER 2008

related images >.

view gallery >

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Kim Jee Woon at the Barbican 2008 1

2008-11-06T21:12:00.005Z

In Photographs

SUBJECT KIM JEE WOON VENUE THE BARBICAN

EVENT THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD OPENING GALA,
THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 6 NOVEMBER 2008

related images >.

view gallery >

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BFI 52nd London Film Festival: Half-Way Point

2008-10-23T14:10:00.019+01:00

The BFI 52nd London Film Festival: Halfway Point

EVENT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL VENUE LEICESTER SQUARE

Day 4 of the London Film Festival for me and with four films in the bag the weather is beginning to turn and everyone's looking/acting irritable. There’s been nothing I’ve hated yet, but there's only been one film, a short, that has grabbed me (more on this in a bit). Tonight’s event is a Times Gala red-carpet screening of Oliver Stone’s W., the sympathetic portrait of one man (the imprudent Dub-ya) and his struggle to refigure his younger self in the more "appropriate" image of his father en route to the White House and certain global humiliation. Stone is in attendance, which should be a treat, and so is that Josh Brolin fellow who may or may not take to the stage and say much.

As for the films I’ve caught this week, first mention goes to Jia Zhangke and Ershsi Cheng Ji (24 City), a film which takes as its master subject the demolition of an aeronautics plant in Chengdu (once a secret military hardware factory) and the mass redundancies to have affected its core workforce since the 1950s. There’s little mourning or nostalgia for the past (life is presented, by and large, in honest terms) and Jia interviews a few of the old workers whose identities were unceremoniously turned upside down by life in the factory. But Jia needs to go further and express that suffering melodramatically, imagining fictional characters who indulge in sometimes disturbing, but always impassioned, tales of hardship ... I’m not sure it works, or serves the film’s purpose. The opening short, He Shang de Aiqing (Cry Me a River), meanwhile, is painful (perhaps way too on the nose for its own good), but intimately well-drawn: two ex-couples from university, now settled with their own "life" partners and having realised what huge disappointments they are to each other after years of personal discovery and repetition, are reunited at a celebration party.

Less successful, perhaps, is the triptych Tôkyô!, which draws together Tokyo-based stories from star directors Bong Joon-ho, Michel Gondry and Leos Carax (much as New York Stories did with its subject, Manhattan). Gondry is given the bum deal of being the first entry in the triptych. Not surprisingly, his "Interior Design" has everything in it that a good first act should have, and his characters are well drawn, but it has the sort of shoddy punchline ending that brings to mind the architecture of other omnibus films such as Stephen King’s Creepshow, and more critically, it fails to address the thematic concerns that expectant audiences are already primed for going into act two. Even mainstream classics, take Groundhog Day for one, teach us that an existence born of subjugation, however humbling, is not a good thing since it amounts to nothing less than a lifetime of forced servitude and sacrificed identity. And not for nothing do the vast majority of film characters rightly recoil from this sort of existence. No such plot development here. Essentially, Gondry’s film ends at the point at which its main character takes her dehumanisation in and by the city, and humbly makes it her own. It isn’t terrifically convincing.

Nor is the South Korean entry in the triptych, delivered by the increasingly popular Bong Joon-ho. "Shaking Tokyo" moves away from the inner-city to the confined quarters of Tokyo’s residential backstreets where Bong picks up the story of a hikikomori, a sort of regimented recluse who hasn’t spoken to a soul in about a decade. Things change when the gorgeous archetype (a dreamy delivery girl) literally falls into his arms, and he must fathom how best to deal with her. In the end, the segment is all male wish-fulfilment fantasy (I wouldn't recommend it), and Bong should be denied basic food privileges for spinning conventional notions of romantic longing via earthquake metaphor.

Over the last couple of days, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about a grim little short by Leos Carax, the second film in the Tôkyô! omnibus, dubiously entitled "Merde." I love its deliberate bleakness. The story goes that a subterranean hermit, who has been living underground for some time and who definitely appears to be "foreign," is now surfacing in and around central and Western Tokyo and terrorising, for no good reason, the unsuspecting citizenry. It all feels sartorial and fun and amusing until one afternoon the actual depth to which the man’s malevolence runs becomes clear, and from that point, the film takes a left turn into uncomfortable, almost Lynchian territory. Curiously enough, Carax’s film is given no mention at all in Tony Rayns’ write-up in the LFF programme, and this perhaps isn’t an accidental omission: the less you know, the more affecting the experience, and disturbing its socio-political statement. But it’s fantastic, a real cult favourite (from what I’ve read when the film has played at other festival circuits, audiences have enjoyed it above and beyond the Gondry and Bong shorts), and it deserves special scholarly attention in contemporary Asian film studies.

One of the most disappointing entries in last year’s line-up of Japanese films was Kitano Takeshi’s Glory to the Filmmaker!, an audacious and surreal film, which was quintessentially "Beat" in comic tone and antics, but ultimately a bit of an indulgent mess. This year’s entry, Achilles and the Tortoise, feels like a return to a more contemplative style of filmmaking for the director (circa Kikujiro and Hana-bi), especially with its sobering themes of parental absence and mortality, yet it plays to convention, photographically, as well as narratively, in a manner that’s reminiscent of the far more commercially successful Zatôichi. What we finally get is a touching and curiously sincere portrait of the mythical Artist, a boy that has barely matured at all: outstandingly impressionable, awkward, lacking responsibility, hurting his loved ones to the real point of extreme absurdity. It, also, is quite affecting, if only for its surprise conclusion, in which Kitano seems to affirm an earlier judgement that the contemporary art world is the province of charlatan dealers, devious hustlers and talentless celebrity rogues. Provocative stuff, at last.

23 October, 2008